And I'm hoping that this won't ruin the MBR.
Do as I do: Promise God never, ever to visit another porn site ever again unless it's some kind of wild, mystifying accident, and then reinstall the system.
And I'm hoping that this won't ruin the MBR.
It would be helpful if you would:
a)Post the url's that these browser windows are pointing to.
b) Take a screenshot of your running processes and post that, as well.
:O)
P
God help me I am trying not to do this but I cannot resist. Try getting a Mac. It will make such a difference. I know I know - but there I have said it.
Boot in safe mode (try F8) and see what is in the startup folder. Remove everything there. I suspect you have a shortcut in your startup folder that is pointing your IE to an evil site. This would not show up on any virus scan or ad-aware type utility.
One more thought, At&T recently sent out a notice that "Pop-Up Stopper" was causing some problems with Explorer. Their suggested solution was to turn off the "check for updates automatically" feature under the "Preferences" section of "Pop-Up Stopper."
The short term approach may no longer work, since some of the newer viruses and trojan horses actually disable spybot and adaware as part of their damage, as well as McAfee and Norton. Some actually reinstall themselves after being "cleaned out" on rebooting, if the job isn't a thorough one. The only possible solution after that requires an experienced user who is comfortable with the registry and painstakingly removes anything and everything that looks like it doesn't belong. Same with the start up folders, all of them. Can't remember if there are two or three.
If this works, it is essential that the hardware firewall on the router is activated with a real password, not the default! I use a combination of upper and lower case: i.e. ZzYZyxX42
With XP, the option as a last resort is to take your computer back to a previous state, assuming the user has been careful to take a snapshot before every time he/she has added new software. Most people don't do it as often as they should. If this doesn't work then a new install is the only option
The strategic solution involves Ghost. This great software allows an image to be created when you know that your system is clean, and in less than a half hour you can replace your infected Operating System with a clean one.
But. This requires a little thinking ahead. At least two partitions or two hard drives are essential. A small one, for the operating system and software, and another exclusively for data. Presently a 50 Gig C drive and 160 Gig D drive work for me. If all of the C drive is ever used, this would require 11 DVDs to create a ghost image. After a year, my C drive backup only requires two.
Before every new software installation I make a Ghost backup. presently it takes about a half hour, either to back up or restore. I can see it taking an hour or more, but the computer does all the work while you watch a movie.
Hope this helps.
Boot with a system disk on a 3 1/2" floppy and get to a C:\ prompt. Then cd to C:\Windows\Internet Explorer and do a rename on iexplore.exe. Change it to something like iiexplore.exe. Then reboot. See what happens. If all is ok then download a copy of Firefox on a different PC and burn it to a CD then install it on your PC. All done.