Yesterday, my wife called me and stated that she couldn't get onto the internet using either Internet Explorer or Firefox. They would start to open and then immediately close. I had her reboot (a common IT standby for these types of situations). That didn't work either. Uh Oh! Looks like we got a computer virus. I came home yesterday evening and started running virus scans. I ran three different ones and they all found different items (some malware, worms, tracking cookies, and a few Trojans). I quarantined them all and deleted/removed them, but that didn't fix the issue. I rebooted again. But, that didn't work either. My best guess is that one of these viruses modified a registry key. I found one useful online trick that I could try to see if this is the case. Another option that I will try tonight is uninstalling and reinstalling Firefox and IE. I downloaded the .exe files for both of those on my thumb-drive so that I can try that tonight. I'm hoping that one of these tricks will work. I'd hate to have to reinstall Windows.
Has anyone experienced this before? What did you do to fix it?
4 comments:
Yes, same problem. I ended up reformatting my hard drive and reloading all of my software.
Hey! I rebooted before you told me to! :)
I had problems with the IE/firefox issue, too. I fixed it, but it would keep coming back and it froze up my system continually. I ended up finally taking it to the Geeks at Best Buy. My computer was the original one built by Dave with three hard drives internally and one exterior back in 1995 with yearly upgrades. Turned out it was cheaper to just buy a new computer with a 1T of memory and Windows 7. I immediately had them install a heavy duty virus program. No problems since.
It turned out to be AVG Anti Virus. They have a link scanner that causes problems with the browsers. I found it using HiJackThis and disabled the link scanner...and everything works fine now. I'm glad it was an easy fix.
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