Very Slow Launch of IE6

[Guest]

Using IE6 SP1 on Windows 2000. IE is taking 25 seconds to open with home
page set to blank. It's also slow when browsing with status message "opening
page...URL of website".

I have DSL and have checked the connection speed and confirmed it is 98%.

My system is clean of viruses and malware. I have several applications live
monitoring after spending a week resolving a recent problem. However, I
think in my zest to clean and restore, I might have changed a registry
setting which is causing the slow problem.

Would appreciate any suggestions to identify and resolve.

Thanks for any help.

 

[Jon Kennedy]

First thing to try would be to totally delete your Temporary Internet Files
and History folders, in case they are too large or are corrupted. Do so
from another user account with admin. privileges. See this site for more
info - http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/delcache.htm

 

[Guest]

Thanks for your reply. I have done these suggested steps:

o Deleted TIF using both Window and manual methods, and by running CCleaner
o Resized the cache to 50 mb
o Deleted cookies

I have been using the Administrator account and I'm the only user of the PC,
and perhaps this complicates resolving the problem. The problem still exists.

What can I do next?

Shirley aka "redhouse"

 

[Jon Kennedy]

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
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/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.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://forums.spywareinfo.com/
http://aumha.net/viewforum.php?f=30
Or one of 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

 

[Harry]

Do you have Zone Alarm installed? I had a similar experience to yours
(30-45 seconds to load IE first time) and only discovered that Zone
Alarm was the culprit when I did an operating system reinstall and
began adding back my usual programs one-by-one. As soon as I installed
ZA, Internet Explorer went back to a crawl.

I am now running Comodo firewall pro, which is superb, and free, and
IE is running like a rocket again.