A
Andrew Davey
Hi,
This is a curly one. Basically something on the computer is telling IE what
sites it can and can't go to. Sort of like a virus. The problem was first
noticed when the laptop in question was moved from one domain to another.
Everything went fine until I went to search for something on google. The
google website came up, I entered in my search terms etc and pressed enter -
nothing happened. So I pressed the submit button - still nothing happened.
Initially I thought that javascript must have been turned off - but it
hadn't. So then I went to our companies website which I know uses javascript
for logins etc and I didn't have any problems. So I thought that google was
having problems. So I went to Yahoo to do my search - again the same thing
happened - I could enter in my query but my search didn't do anything. The
little windows flag (in the top right corner) didn't move a muscle. So I
tried to do a search on lycos - there I had no problems - I could search
away to my hearts content.
So then I tried to lookup this problem on technet. Normally when I go to
technet I type in www.microsoft.com/technet which then redirects me to the
proper site. This time it did nothing. Yet when I typed in
support.microsoft.com I was able to search the knowledge base. This was the
first time that I noticed that the browser was doing funny stuff
irrespective of javascript.
So I installed Netscape 4.7 and low and behold I had no problems going to
any of the above sites and performing searched etc.
Because I thought that maybe I had done somethign horribly wrong when I
changed the domain the computer belonged to I decided to do a system restore
(to the one that I had made earlier). When I did this and logged back on to
the previous domain, I had not problems at all. YET when I logged on to the
computers local domain IE demonstrated the same behaviour.
So I did two complete virus scans using Symantec's online scanner and
McCaffee's Virus Scan - nothing was found. I then used Lavasofts Ad-Aware to
see if there was some sort of trojan etc grabbing my search text and
forgetting to forward it on to the appropriate website - again nothing was
found. I even viewed the source of googles front page and compared it with
that downloaded from another computer on the same network that uses the same
gateway to access the internet and found them to be exactly the same.
What do I think's happened. I think that there is some pluggin that has
infected IE and is catching the requests to certain sites and not forwarding
them on to the gateway/web server. Note that Netscape has never demonstrated
this problem - which to my understanding tends to suggest the problem lies
closer to IE than say a system infection. I did use msconfig to set the
computer to restart without processing the startup items and win.ini etc
etc.
What is my question? Well has anyone else ever experienced something like
this? What are some locations on the harddisk that I can look at to
determine if when IE/Explorer starts these plugins get run or loaded etc?
Any suggestions at all as to how to fix this problem will be greatly
appreciated.
Thanks heaps in advance,
Andy
This is a curly one. Basically something on the computer is telling IE what
sites it can and can't go to. Sort of like a virus. The problem was first
noticed when the laptop in question was moved from one domain to another.
Everything went fine until I went to search for something on google. The
google website came up, I entered in my search terms etc and pressed enter -
nothing happened. So I pressed the submit button - still nothing happened.
Initially I thought that javascript must have been turned off - but it
hadn't. So then I went to our companies website which I know uses javascript
for logins etc and I didn't have any problems. So I thought that google was
having problems. So I went to Yahoo to do my search - again the same thing
happened - I could enter in my query but my search didn't do anything. The
little windows flag (in the top right corner) didn't move a muscle. So I
tried to do a search on lycos - there I had no problems - I could search
away to my hearts content.
So then I tried to lookup this problem on technet. Normally when I go to
technet I type in www.microsoft.com/technet which then redirects me to the
proper site. This time it did nothing. Yet when I typed in
support.microsoft.com I was able to search the knowledge base. This was the
first time that I noticed that the browser was doing funny stuff
irrespective of javascript.
So I installed Netscape 4.7 and low and behold I had no problems going to
any of the above sites and performing searched etc.
Because I thought that maybe I had done somethign horribly wrong when I
changed the domain the computer belonged to I decided to do a system restore
(to the one that I had made earlier). When I did this and logged back on to
the previous domain, I had not problems at all. YET when I logged on to the
computers local domain IE demonstrated the same behaviour.
So I did two complete virus scans using Symantec's online scanner and
McCaffee's Virus Scan - nothing was found. I then used Lavasofts Ad-Aware to
see if there was some sort of trojan etc grabbing my search text and
forgetting to forward it on to the appropriate website - again nothing was
found. I even viewed the source of googles front page and compared it with
that downloaded from another computer on the same network that uses the same
gateway to access the internet and found them to be exactly the same.
What do I think's happened. I think that there is some pluggin that has
infected IE and is catching the requests to certain sites and not forwarding
them on to the gateway/web server. Note that Netscape has never demonstrated
this problem - which to my understanding tends to suggest the problem lies
closer to IE than say a system infection. I did use msconfig to set the
computer to restart without processing the startup items and win.ini etc
etc.
What is my question? Well has anyone else ever experienced something like
this? What are some locations on the harddisk that I can look at to
determine if when IE/Explorer starts these plugins get run or loaded etc?
Any suggestions at all as to how to fix this problem will be greatly
appreciated.
Thanks heaps in advance,
Andy