hello,

my computer was freezing up last night, so i went to end the IE application,
but in my sleepy haze spaced out and ended the internet explorer processes
instead. my computer was really slow this morning and then it began freezing
and now when i turn it on there is a constant little hourglass when i wave
the arrow at the toolbar and it won't let me access anything. the only thing
it will let me do is hit ctrl, alt, del and shut down, but even when i do
that a box pops up saying that explorer.exe isn't responding and i keep
having to hit "end task" over and over and over again until it finally shuts
down.

i have windows xp home edition, i'm assuming IE6. any help would be greatly
appreciated.

thanks!

This may be caused by spyware/malware that's gotten installed on
your system. Use Ad-Aware, Windows Defender and/or Spybot Search & Destroy
to remove it.

Windows Defender (beta)
http://www.microsoft.com/athome/secu...e/default.mspx
Ad-Aware: http://www.lavasoftusa.com/
Spybot: http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html
Good sites on how to install and use Spybot -
http://www.safer-networking.org/en/tutorial/index.html
http://tomcoyote.com/SPYBOT/index1.php

Also download a winsock repair tool, to have just in case cleaning up
anything found breaks it -

Winsock repair tools:
LSPFix- all versions of Windows http://www.cexx.org/lspfix.zip
Winsock2 Fix- Win98, ME
http://www.bu.edu/pcsc/internetaccess/winsock2fix.html
LavaSoft- all versions of Windows-
http://digital-solutions.co.uk/lavasoft/whndnfix.zip

More information here:
http://www.spywareinfo.com/
http://inetexplorer.mvps.org/tshoot.html
http://spywarewarrior.com/sww-help.htm

If no joy, in IE go to Tools...Internet Options...Advanced tab, Browsing
section, uncheck "Enable third-party browser extensions", click Apply, click
Okay, reboot. If that solves your problem, then more troubleshooting is
needed to find out exactly which program, or Browser Helper Object (BHO) is
causing this problem. You don't want to leave it at that, as some BHOs are
useful or necessary - like Adobe Acrobat for reading .pdf files or an
essential component of Norton AV. Get BHODemon -
http://www.definitivesolutions.com/bhodemon.htm - read all about BHOs.
Disable all items, and then gradually replace one or two at a time to narrow
down the culprit.

Or if you have IE 6 SP-2 you can do this within the browser:
How to manage Internet Explorer add-ons in Windows XP Service Pack 2
http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;883256

If all the above fails, then the problem could be something new that the
spyware cleaners above don't have in their databases yet. In that case....
HijackThis direct download:
http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/files/hijackthis.zip
Tutorial on how to use HijackThis:
http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/htlogtutorial.html
Then post it's output log to the forum here for analysis and feedback by the
parasite experts:
http://www.spywareinfo.com/forums/
Or the other HijackThis Logs forums listed here:
http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/forums.html

Or try this program to get some of the most nasty malware:
CWShredder direct download:
http://aumha.org/downloads/cwshredder.zip

An alternate resource for all of this and more:
http://www.aumha.org/secure.htm


--

Jon R. Kennedy
Charlotte, NC, USA
(E-Mail Removed)

"ihaterobots" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:EBC05CA4-A14C-4ECB-983A-(E-Mail Removed)...
> hello,
>
> my computer was freezing up last night, so i went to end the IE
> application,
> but in my sleepy haze spaced out and ended the internet explorer processes
> instead. my computer was really slow this morning and then it began
> freezing
> and now when i turn it on there is a constant little hourglass when i wave
> the arrow at the toolbar and it won't let me access anything. the only
> thing
> it will let me do is hit ctrl, alt, del and shut down, but even when i do
> that a box pops up saying that explorer.exe isn't responding and i keep
> having to hit "end task" over and over and over again until it finally
> shuts
> down.
>
> i have windows xp home edition, i'm assuming IE6. any help would be
> greatly
> appreciated.
>
> thanks!