Illegal Operation When Connecting to Internet

[Flippy]

I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions for how to resolve the
following problem:
I am running Win98SE with IE6 and Netscape 7.2. I recently had a
problem where I was no longer able to play movies, so in the course of
trying to fix that problem, I re-installed Windows. Unfortunately,
that still did not fix the video problem, and now when I try to launch
either Internet Explorer or Netscape, the program will launch OK, but
once my computer connects to my ISP and tries to launch a website, I
get the following error:

Iexplore: This program has performed an illegal operation and will be
shut down. Details include: IESPLORE causeed an invalid page fault in
module <unknown> at 000:00771072.
Registers: (several lines of letters and numbers)

I can launch IE OK and can even open web pages on my hard drive, but as
soon as I connect to the internet and try to launch a web page, I get
this error and it crashes. I've tried uninstalling and re-installing
various windows components and have tried repairing IE6 with no
improvement. I tried to re-install Netscape, but I don't have a local
install file and cannot connect to the internet to successfully launch
the re-install. Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Joe

 

[Jon Kennedy]

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

Microsoft Anti-Spyware (beta)
http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/spyware/software/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/Darnit.html
http://www.doxdesk.com/parasite/ - runs a little script when loading page to
check for common parasites

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.aspx?scid=kb;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