Thu 8th January 2009
|
A friend of mine recently presented me with their Vista PC running McAfee Antivirus which had a strange problem. Everytime they tried to open Internet Explorer they simply got a message stating that Internet Explorer cannot find http:// and then a string of random Chinese characters. These characters changed everytime Internet Explorer was opened. Internet Explorer would then shut down and restart itself, the message would again appear and this loop would continue until you ended the "iexplore.exe" task in task manager.
No problem! Classic Malware/Virus infection I thought. So, I get my trusty copy of Combofix out and run it on the machine. Unusually it finds nothing. So, I decided to install and run Spybot Search & Destroy thinking it would just be a standard piece of Adware, this found nothing either. Strange indeed!
So, I decided to Google the problem and hence the reason for this post really. The only post I could find relating to this problem was here and the only fix offered was a complete Operating System re-installation, no thanks! Anyway, read on for the fix....
I ran Internet Explorer with no Add-Ons (Start->Programs->Accessories->System Tools) and it ran fine. This proves the problem to be with one of the Add-ons. So, I went through each Add-On disabling them one by one until I found the culprit. (To do this, right-click the Internet Explorer icon on the desktop and choose "Properties", click the "Programs" tab and click the "Manage Add-Ons" button). The culprit turned out to be the McAfee SiteAdvisor Toolbar, once this add-on was disabled Internet Explorer worked fine.
I'm guessing unistalling and reinstalling McAfee would fix this but in my friend's case I uninstalled McAfee and stuck avast! on instead. Job done. |
|
| |
