IE Won't Open

[Guest]

For some reason, I can not longer open IE. When I click on the desktop icon
the hour clock appears for a second and then disappears. I've tried various
options to open the program, but nothing works. Toshiba’s troubleshooting
guide doesn’t provide help for this topic. In Windows Task Manager
(processes tab) I can see explorer.exe is running. Any suggestions?

Background (but not sure if relevant) I’m in the process of moving my DLS to
a new address. In the mean time I was trying to hook up a new wireless
connection. I was having problems viewing web pages. - error message was
“invalid DNS Serverâ€. I also rec’d this error message for Yahoo’s browser
which I think if Netscape.

I switched to a different wireless provider. Now I can access the internet
through yahoo’s browser. IE stopped working all together. I can’t remember
now if IE stopped working all together before I switched to the new provider.

 

[Guest]

Hi,

Do not worry.. I will help you.

Please do windows update first by dowloading the lastest available service
pack and downloading known patches for IE like the SP1 for IE 6. if the
problem is still not solved after a PC restart, please tell me which OS you
have and what is the version of IE you are using.

Good luck

Regards,
Rahul Nathan

 

[Jon Kennedy]

The process for IE is iexplore.exe. Explorer.exe is Windows Explorer - the
core Windows system file.

This may be caused by spyware/malware that's gotten installed on
your system. Use Ad-Aware, MSAS and/or Spybot Search & Destroy to remove
it.

Microsoft Anti-Spyware (beta)
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/Darnit.html
http://www.doxdesk.com/parasite/ - runs a little script when loading page to
check for common parasites

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://www.spywareinfo.com/forums/
Or 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

If still no joy after making sure your system is clean:

How to Reinstall or Repair Internet Explorer and Outlook Express in Windows
XP (Q318378)
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;Q318378