Hope this will help your browser redirect problem.
I too had a problem accessing Google and other search sites on my company computer a few months ago. This computer is behind an industrial strength corporate firewall and protected by Norton Corporate AV, but still, something managed to slip through undetected and redirect some URLs. My corporate people managed to find a virus description that sounded like the right thing, although my computer didn't have all of the symptoms, one was there--a file named "HOSTS" (no extension) with a bunch of redirection information (ASCII text file, but without the TXT extension--you can open it with NOTEPAD or WORDPAD).
There were several of these files, but one had a lot of URL names, and all pointed to the same IP address. I erased the contents of the HOSTS file (to be careful--I found later, you can just erase the file), resaved it as an empty file and that solved the problem. So do a file search for HOSTS and erase all of them. If you are not sure whether they are used for anything, simply rename them with a .SAM extension and test your system. You can always remove that if it has a negative effect.
Hey thanks, as a matter of fact my problem did turn out to be a virus/spyware just like this. I managed to get rid of it with a McAfee full scan along with an Ad-Aware full scan. Those problems have gone away, I'm happy to report.