IE stops responding

[Emmanuel]

On quite a few of the commputers in my company IE will
refuse to open the home page and will stop responding.
This occurs sometimes right away and sometimes after using
the computer for a while. Logging in as another user does
not help. I have also noticed that when this happens,
going into the system control panel menu will also stop
responding. A reboot will always fix the
problem. The problem will sometimes resurface after about
30 minutes or so. After a few reboots it seems to go the
rest of the day. I thought it was also related to spyware
so I did adaware scans and spybout scans as well. Some
found spyware, others didn't. In all cases the problem
showed itself again the next day. I though maybe it might
be related to the new version of spybot, but after
removing it, the same problem remains. All of my systems
have IE 6 SP1 and Windows 2000 SP3, but the machines have
various updates installed and are not all current on
critical updates. I have also tried defragmenting the
computer, increasing the pagefile size, removing all
temporary internet files and deleting all cookies. Any
ideas?

 

[Kevin]

I would firstly concentrate on getting all the critical updates installed on
all your machines. After that, update Ad-aware and Spybot Search and
Destroy and run them both, on all machines. Find HiJack This! and install
it and run it on all the machines. Have it delete any hijackers you find.
Make sure that System Restore is disabled before running any scans, you will
lose all your restore points, but this is a place where malware is known to
hide from scanners. Download copies of Pest Patrol and Spyware Blaster,
update as needed and run them both on all the machines.

Make sure you have good anti-virus software installed on all the systems as
well as a good firewall.