extra characters in search words

[Betty]

Normally when I type a word into my explorer bar it does
a search with msn and pops up the results into the ie
window, now however when i type in a word it either adds
extra characters to it like ?%20 or tries to make it a
website and open it which then produces an error. what
can i do to fix this?

 

[Frank Saunders, MS-MVP]

Normally when I type a word into my explorer bar it does
a search with msn and pops up the results into the ie
window, now however when i type in a word it either adds
extra characters to it like ?%20 or tries to make it a
website and open it which then produces an error. what
can i do to fix this?

First eliminate any scumware.
See
Dealing with Unwanted Spyware, Parasites, Toolbars and Search Engines
http://mvps.org/winhelp2002/unwanted.htm

Note that AdAware and SpyBot S & D will each catch some things the other
won't. Also, each needs to be updated with the program's update function
before every use, even when just downloaded. There's also a lot more to do
than just those two programs. CWShredder is also available here:
http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/regs_edits/cwshredder.zip
**Post your HijackThis log to
http://forums.spywareinfo.com/ or the Spyware forum at
http://forum.aumha.org/ for expert analysis, not here.**
Alternative download pages for Ad-Aware, Spybot, HijackThis and CWShredder
may be found on this page:
http://aumha.org/a/parasite.htm.
If trying everything at that site does not fix the problem please post back
in the same thread.

--
Frank Saunders, MS-MVP, IE/OE
Please respond in Newsgroup. Do not send email
http://www.fjsmjs.com
Protect your PC
http://www.microsoft.com/security/protect/

 

[John]

Go into a webpage like http://www.google.com/ to do your
searches. What has happened is that your searches are
being treated as url addresses. You should do internet
searches from internet search web pages where they have
web page forms for you to do text entry of your search
terms. There's good engines at http://www.google.com/
and http://www.search.com/ for example as well as
http://www.lycos.com/ that I know of personally.

Do you happen to share your computer with someone else?
Someone or you might have set the internet option to send
urls as UTF-8 format which isn't a bad thing necessarily
but the UTF-8 format is a more generalized text encoding
than what is normally used and is still in an
experimental testing phase on the internet as many
special characters haven't been mapped for usage accross
the internet on all programs yet and so you see those
strange characters sometimes. Or your browser might be
looking at pages in UTF-8 for some reason unrelated to
settings, just because you may have visited some webpages
that asked for permission to be viewed and you said yes.