IE fails to connect to home page

[Mark F.]

Problem:
Launching IE opens to the home page and then closes immediately.
Sometimes before the page finishes loading, however, it will open an
html document on the local machine. Pinging any connection is fine, and
Netscape 7 works fine.

Running:
Cable connection
Windows XP SP2
MSIE 6.00.2900.2180.xpsp_sp2_rtm.040803-2158
MS Firewall installed and on.
Trend Micro Anti Virus

Here's what I have tried:

Shutdown all unnecessary processes and removed spyware using several
tools.
Found 4 Trojans (downloaders) that were successfully removed.
Cleaned the drive of all trash.
Ran Hijack This on the machine and fixed many registry errors.
Removed the Winsock registry entries and rewrote them with a reg file.

The IE browser worked for several minutes. After a restart the problem
reappeared. Any other ideas would be most appreciated.

Thanks,
Mark

 

[Mark F.]

Never mind. It was Newdotnet that was causing the trouble. I removed it
with AdAware.