IE6 "working offline" mode and restricted sites question

[Michael Wright]

I have two strange problems that have showed up within the last month or so:

(1) On my laptop I've had a dial-up connection installed for when I'm away
from home. The option, "Dial whenever no connection is found" has been set.
All seems to be well until I try to access a bad webpage or a site that
doesn't want to load for some reason. When this happens, IE6 pops up my
dial-up window. Since my modem isn't connected, I don't want to dial-up
anything...so I close this window. When I close the window, IE6
automatically goes into the "working offline" mode. I have to than tell IE6
to connect again. I'm running XP-Home, SP2. The only solution I've found
is to tell IE to "Never dial a connection" which will be fine until I'm in a
situation where I want to dial a connection. I've tried to replicate this
on another XP-Home, SP2 machine and cannot. For some reason, when a page
cannot be displayed, IE6 thinks it isn't connected to the internet and that
it needs to dial-up. I'm frustrated with this and would appreciate any help
or ideas.

(2) On my laptop, under the "Restricted Sites" zone, there are numerous
sites listed as being restricted. I don't know why these are there and
don't know how they got there! I've tried deleting them, but when I close
the window and reopen it, the sites are all back. How can these sites be
removed "for good?"

Thanks.

 

[Sandi - Microsoft MVP]

Hi Michael,

Regarding (1) - maybe this will work:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;q303346

Regarding (2) - do you recognise those sites? They are actually stored in
the registry, so will have to be deleted from there. This URL will point
you to the relevant key:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/182569/EN-US/

Being..
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet
Settings\Zones\4

--

__________________________________________
Hyperlinks used to ensure advice is current
Sandi - Microsoft MVP since 1999
http://inetexplorer.mvps.org

Visit the Internet Explorer Community
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/community/default.mspx

 

[Michael Wright]

Sandi,

Thank you for your reply.

Regarding (1) - I have checked the LOADLCE and the LOADSENS values
already...they are both set to AUTO. I don't think I tried clearing the
History files...perhaps that will help.

Thanks in advance.
Michael

 

[Michael Wright]

Yes, I am using a wireless adapter on the laptop. Why would this only
happen when I try to access a page that doesn't exist or if I type in an
incorrect web address? It doesn't seem to drop any other time.

 

[Michael Wright]

One other thing...I tested this by also plugging in my wired adapter and the
same thing occurs. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with the wireless
adapter.

Thanks for the suggestion.

 

[Jon Kennedy]

Possible answer to both questions:

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

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.htm
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

 

[Michael Wright]

Update!

I have ran Ad-Aware, Spybot S&D, and MS AntiSpyware. Not much was found,
but what was found I removed. This problem still occurs.

It apparently is only something that effects IE6...but if I have WinXP set
to "dial whenever no connection is found" and I try to search for a page
that isn't valid...IE wants to dial-up. Evidently IE is checking all
available "sources" before telling me a page cannot be found. I have gone
through everything I can find...everything others have suggested...and I
find no way of preventing this, short of telling Windows to "never dial."

Has anyone else experienced this...does it seem logical. The dial-up prompt
doesn't pop up when Windows is set to "never dial."

Thanks again to everyone who posted a response.

 

[bumtracks]

fwiw;
Months back I installed MSN Toolbar into IE which was a search box and
pop-up stopper before sp2 - it added a bunch of restricted sites ... kinda
wish I still had those settings in there, but current sp2/IE popup
blocker works cool now instead too.

 

[Jon Kennedy]

Did you run HijackThis and post it's output log to a forum where an expert
can take a look-see? Sometimes Ad-Aware and Spybot won't catch some of the
nastier things that are much harder to remove. And, of course, the MS
product is still in beta.

 

[Guest]

did youever figure out how to fix the dial up box other than by checking
never dial up. i've got the same problem despite a fine dsl connection.

 

[Michael Wright]

Dr Z,

No, I never could figure it out. I decided maybe it is the "nature of the
beast." It is only a problem when I don't have the "never dial" option
selected. It doesn't act like I have any other connectivity issues. IE is
the only program that it seems to influence. Outlook will continue to work
fine either way, FireFox will continue to work fine.

I called HP...they suggested it might be the correct behavior. It is like
IE wants to check all possible connections for a webpage that you are trying
to access.

I didn't run HijackThis yet...but I might before it is over.

Michael

 

[kdarling]

No, I never could figure it out. I decided maybe it is the "nature of the
beast." It is only a problem when I don't have the "never dial" option
selected. It doesn't act like I have any other connectivity issues. IE is
the only program that it seems to influence. Outlook will continue to work
fine either way, FireFox will continue to work fine.

This hit us in our offline web application. It used to be that IE's
autodial settings affected all apps. In other words, it set
system-wide autodial.

With XP and IE 6, the autodial setting is _only_ for IE. And IE 6 seems
to do some kind of DNS lookup to see if it's online or not... bringing
up its own dialer if it can't get a resolution. (This would've
actually worked great for our offline app, but unfortunately the IE
autodialer is braindead and can't handle terminal windows for security
passcode entry after dial.)

Anyway, a possible solution is to leave IE set to "never dial"... and
if you actually want autodialing, then start the Remote Access
Autoconnection Manager service. That's the new background autodialer
for all applications. Can't remember if this'll act the way you want.
(What way do you want?

Kev

 

[Michael Wright]

Kev,

Thanks for your great reply. I would actually like XP to only prompt me for
a dial-up when my laptop is not connected through another network
connection. I have a Ethernet adapter and a wireless adapter. I only have
dial-up configured for when I'm on the road somewhere and don't have access
to wired or wireless. Your reply at least makes sense...and I did narrow it
down to evidently an IE-only problem and not something that impacted other
programs.

Michael

 

[Robert Aldwinckle]

Kev,

Thanks for your great reply. I would actually like XP to only prompt me for a dial-up when my laptop is not connected through
another network connection. I have a Ethernet adapter and a wireless adapter. I only have dial-up configured for when I'm on the
road somewhere and don't have access to wired or wireless. Your reply at least makes sense...and I did narrow it down to
evidently an IE-only problem and not something that impacted other programs.

AutoDial seems to be a carryover from NT4.
I used to have the symptom you are complaining about with NT4
and never knew exactly where it came from. Actually, I found it
useful since it allowed me to use my localhost connection online
without dialing but still be prompted to dial if I wanted to use
an external address. That was all using Never dial... BTW.


One of the strange poorly documented features that came with it
was a utility called rasautou. I just checked and its still there in XP.
So, out of curiosity what do you see if you switch to a command window
and enter:

rasautou -s

Here's a bit more information about it:

<title>KB152220 - How to View and Remove Information from AutoDial</title>


Hmm... that article caused me to search for "autodial addresses":

<title>KB164249 - Autodial Heuristics</title>

<title>KB169244 - Autodial Fails to Dial Automatically</title>

Perhaps by learning how it should work you can find out how to
disable it?


Good luck

Robert Aldwinckle
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