ie opening when not online

[chas]

i'm running xp pro on a p4 1.5 ghz system. When i boot up i get ie starting by itself and i haven't clicked it open, and i'm not even hooked up to the internet. I get about 50 instances of it built up on the taskbar. I get an error message saying that ie cannot inialize. Any thoughts on why it opens by itself and will not go away?

[rjfvillarosa]

That sounds a little viral to me, what antivirus and spyware scanners are you using?

[rcvalencia9]

One of my friends had the same problem like that. He reformatted his PC and reinstalled windows. But you should first try to scan your PC for viruses.

[frizzy]

This could be spyware/adware or a virus and there is a number of things you could check to fix this.

One good place to start would be to run ad-awareSE or spybot on your computer to help find and destroy spyware. After that, if the problem persists. You can try using BHOdemon this program can tell you what BHOs you have installed on your computer and can help you remove them. If searching for spyware does not fix the problem there are a couple of registry keys you could check as well as it also helps to clear all the temp folders on the computer as well.

[Stuey]

After you run an antivirus scan, and a spyware scan, if the problem still persists, run msconfig, and check out the startup items. Generally, items with boxes instead of characters, and entries with blank names are the most suspicious. Although its a time consuming process (which is why I recommend this only after you run several antivirus and antispyware scans), search for the processes on the internet. Usually, it will be listed on random websites as harmless or as known spyware.

"HijackThis" might make the job simpler b/c it analyzes your running processes and services. However I don't think it will catch a startup program that initiates something and then closes itself.

HijackThis can be found here.

[chas]

Thanks all for the info, i will try a scan for spyware and adware

[HeddaLora]

A few good products along these lines:

-- AdAware, check for updates, run it and remove whatever it finds

-- Update and turn on SpywareBlaster and SpywareGuard.