Freezes fixed but not sure why

[Guest]

Had constant freezes in IE6. Tried all the usual fixes w/o success. Saw a
Microsoft artcile http://support.microsoft.com/kb/318378 which explains
different ways to uninstall and reinstall IE. I followed the directions for
the regedit method and changed the appropriate value from 1 to 0 and
re-booted. On reboot I got the message "Internet Explorer has been unistalled
do you want to remove your personal settings" (or something close to that). I
clicked "no." When the re-boot completed IE6 in fact was still present, the
registry value was still 0, but IE now works fine w/o freezes. Can
anyoneexplain what happened here and why this did not work as explained but
nevertheless seemd to fix my problem?

 

[Jon Kennedy]

You may have rolled back to a previous version of IE 6. In IE, what version
does Help...About report? What version of Windows are you using?

 

[Guest]

IE Version 6.0.2900.2180; Windows XP Pro SP2. Interestingly, today for the
first time since I did what I described in the initial post, when I booted up
I got the same message quoted in the original post. Yet, again when I said
"no" to cleaning up my personal seetings, IE was present and working fine. Do
I need to change the registry value back to 1?

 

[Guest]

spoke too soon...locked up on me again

 

[Jon Kennedy]

What do you mean by "freezes"? Does the whole screen lock up requiring you
to reboot, or does IE just become unresponsive?

 

[Guest]

IE becomes unresponsive but usually just one of several windows that may be
open at tha time.

 

[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