IE bails out when trying to go online

[Tim Anderson]

We have a customer running XP-home addition on a Dell desktop that's about 1
year old. She says she noticed her computer running somewhat slower about a
week ago and then two days ago she could no longer get on the Internet.
She's a college student and has an Ipod and downloads music. She says this
has been working fine until her recent problem.

When she starts IE is says (in the lower left corner) connecting to (it
lists an IP address), then it simply closes and she's back at the Desktop.
No error messages, nothing. She just can't get connected. She has McAfee but
it has not been updated recently. She's using Comcast (cable).

I had her download McAfee Stinger (the latest version updated on 10/5/05) on
her mother's computer, transfer it to a floppy and run it on her computer. I
know it only checks for 54 different viruses/worms/trojans but the ones it
looks for are the most common offenders. It found nothing.

Just for fun We considered doing a system restore to before she started
having problems, but she could not choose a prior month to select a restore
point (clicking on the previous month arrow in the calendar did nothing).

Any suggestions you have will be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,

Tim Anderson

 

[Quaoar]

We have a customer running XP-home addition on a Dell desktop that's
about 1
year old. She says she noticed her computer running somewhat slower
about a
week ago and then two days ago she could no longer get on the
Internet.
She's a college student and has an Ipod and downloads music. She says
this
has been working fine until her recent problem.

When she starts IE is says (in the lower left corner) connecting to
(it
lists an IP address), then it simply closes and she's back at the
Desktop.
No error messages, nothing. She just can't get connected. She has
McAfee but
it has not been updated recently. She's using Comcast (cable).

I had her download McAfee Stinger (the latest version updated on
10/5/05) on
her mother's computer, transfer it to a floppy and run it on her
computer. I
know it only checks for 54 different viruses/worms/trojans but the
ones it
looks for are the most common offenders. It found nothing.

Just for fun We considered doing a system restore to before she
started
having problems, but she could not choose a prior month to select a
restore
point (clicking on the previous month arrow in the calendar did
nothing).

Any suggestions you have will be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,

Tim Anderson

In task manager, does the person see iexplore.exe running in about
10,000K? If IE is started again, will it then start normally? This
particular problem can be resolved by disabling every Add-on in
Tools/Add-ons; the user would have to be able to get IE to start the
second time to make this work. Safe Mode might present an avenue for
disabling the Add-ons. You might also have the user uninstall all Google
apps, any Adobe Reader helpers in Add-Remove programs.

Q

 

[Tim Anderson]

We went into IE and clicked on Stop as soon as it tried to load a webpage
and it allowed us to go to Tool/Add-Ons to disable all of her add-ons (AIM,
Windows Messenger, Java, Google, etc.). We then closed IE and reopened it
gave us the "Internet Explorer has encountered a problem and needs to close"
error message. We cloed it went in again re-enabled Java, closed IE,
restarted it again and it actually loaded a webpage... but then it gave us
the IE has encountered a problem error again. We tried rebooting, disabling
and re-enabling Java, etc., but could not get IE to load a page again. Every
time IE starts it give us the "encountered a problem" message with our only
option being to close IE.

I had the customer go to a command prompt and ping Yahoo.com and she got 4
replies so I'm fairly sure TCP/IP and all is OK and that the problem is with
IE. Do you agree? Is there a way to uninstall/reinstall or repair IE in XP?

Thank you for your continued great help.

Tim Anderson

 

[Guest]

Thanks Quaoar, that fixed my problem. I'd click Internet Explorer and it
would start a process but not show the active window. When I checked in task
manager there were heaps of them but only one window!!

The add-ons I disable were:
{CD67F990-D8E9-11D2-98FE-00C0F0318AFE}
DriveLetterAccess by Sonic Solutions
Research

Do you know what these do and which ones are causing the problem?