G
Gary Burton
This may be the most difficult computer problem I have had in years. Internet Explorer version 6 has been invaded by something evil. I am running WinXP Home Edition, Service Pack 1. I have 2 machines sharing the same network connection. One is infected and the other is not. Most websites load fine on either machine. Only certain sites are affected, and only on one machine. But the affected sites are very important to me. This evil has two basic symptoms.
1) When I log on to certain web pages, the CPU gets bogged down, and if I try to close out the browser, it overloads the processor and slows to a crawl. If I try to close out the browser before the page finishes loading, the browser stops responding and refuses to close.
2) When I try to go to the Windows Update site (http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com) on the infected machine, I get a "This page cannot be displayed." message. If I do the same thing on the other machine, I get the correct page.
I have run scandisk, Norton Antivirus 2002 with the latest definitions, and AdAware Professional SE with the latest definitions. I did another full virus scan with the Trend Micro online scan. I cleaned the registry with RegSupreme.
I also did a poor-man's reinstall of Internet Explorer by installing with a right-click from the IE.INF file, but I did not overwrite newer files with the originals because I was afraid of what might happen. I may get up the courage to do that, if I don't get a better idea.
I tried to log on to Windows Update with another browser, hoping that the new security updates would correct the problem. I downloaded and installed both Opra and FireFox, but neither one of them would log on to anything. With FireFox, I got "The connection was refused when attempting to contact xxxx) where xxxx is the name of whatever site I typed into the address field. Opra gave me a similar result, but the error message was "Could not connect to remote server xxxx." I suspect that this is just another symptom of the same problem.
I installed Service Pack 2 about a month ago, but I had to uninstall it again because of problems it created with my video cards on both machines. I couldn't install it now if I wanted to because I can't get to the update site.
I could not find any clues in the MS Knowledge Base, or with various Google searches.
1) When I log on to certain web pages, the CPU gets bogged down, and if I try to close out the browser, it overloads the processor and slows to a crawl. If I try to close out the browser before the page finishes loading, the browser stops responding and refuses to close.
2) When I try to go to the Windows Update site (http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com) on the infected machine, I get a "This page cannot be displayed." message. If I do the same thing on the other machine, I get the correct page.
I have run scandisk, Norton Antivirus 2002 with the latest definitions, and AdAware Professional SE with the latest definitions. I did another full virus scan with the Trend Micro online scan. I cleaned the registry with RegSupreme.
I also did a poor-man's reinstall of Internet Explorer by installing with a right-click from the IE.INF file, but I did not overwrite newer files with the originals because I was afraid of what might happen. I may get up the courage to do that, if I don't get a better idea.
I tried to log on to Windows Update with another browser, hoping that the new security updates would correct the problem. I downloaded and installed both Opra and FireFox, but neither one of them would log on to anything. With FireFox, I got "The connection was refused when attempting to contact xxxx) where xxxx is the name of whatever site I typed into the address field. Opra gave me a similar result, but the error message was "Could not connect to remote server xxxx." I suspect that this is just another symptom of the same problem.
I installed Service Pack 2 about a month ago, but I had to uninstall it again because of problems it created with my video cards on both machines. I couldn't install it now if I wanted to because I can't get to the update site.
I could not find any clues in the MS Knowledge Base, or with various Google searches.