For no apparent reason IE will open a window and go to my home page. This
happens even if I'm playing a simple game, such as solitare, and have no
internet windows open - alhough I do have a cable connection. A small black
window pops up for a second on the bottom right of my screen just before the
window opens but I cannot see what it reads. Occassionally one lingers long
enough to see the word "search" and at these times it opens a Google search
page instead of going to my home page. Mostly, it goes to my home page.
I've run Norton, Ad Ware and Search & Destroy and found nothing. I've also
done a system restore to several previous dates with no success. Any
suggestions on what's happening and how to stop it? Thanks!
Jon Kennedy
07-09-2005, 11:12 PM
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.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
--
Jon R. Kennedy
Charlotte, NC, USA
jkennedy2@carolina.rr.com
"Kate" <Kate@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:559399DB-D5A0-4B05-865B-08BCED018AD4@microsoft.com...
> For no apparent reason IE will open a window and go to my home page. This
> happens even if I'm playing a simple game, such as solitare, and have no
> internet windows open - alhough I do have a cable connection. A small
> black
> window pops up for a second on the bottom right of my screen just before
> the
> window opens but I cannot see what it reads. Occassionally one lingers
> long
> enough to see the word "search" and at these times it opens a Google
> search
> page instead of going to my home page. Mostly, it goes to my home page.
> I've run Norton, Ad Ware and Search & Destroy and found nothing. I've
> also
> done a system restore to several previous dates with no success. Any
> suggestions on what's happening and how to stop it? Thanks!