IE6 & AIM Failures

[Jack Albers]

We have a Dell Dimension 4550 with a Pentium 4 @ 2.53 Ghz and 256 MB of DDR SDRAM running Windows XP home edition with the following problems: We cannot stay on the internet with IE6 for longer than a few minutes before it freezes and closes itself. We have tried reinstalling IE6, but aren't sure that it actually happened. Also we cannot stay logged on to AOL Instant Messenger for more than a few minutes without getting signed out or "kicked off" automatically. Interestingly enough, these problems happen mostly when our daughter is logged on to the computer with her profile.

I believe the two problems are somehow related and could be caused by some sort of software or driver conflict. Our daughter believes the fault lies with our wireless network set-up (which we are using to share a cable modem broadband connection to the internet) because our son sometimes has these same problems on his computer.

Any thoughts?

Thanks so much--
Jack

[darkhooda]

Possibly some security issues, do you have any AV software???

[Jack Albers]

The Dell came with a 90-day trial of McAfee which lapsed for a few months until recently when I loaded McAfee 6.0 on it.

[hobey19]

free online virus scan. doesn't install anything to your computer. mcafee is a bit flaky, and can't be trusted. housecall is good stuff

http://housecall.trendmicro.com/hous...start_corp.asp

craig

[glc]

Definitely run a Housecall scan - this sounds like the Blaster worm.

[Jack Albers]

I performed the HouseCall scan, and indeed it found 23 instances of five different Trojan viruses, most of which were in our daughter's Documents and Setings folder! I deleted all the files since they were not cleanable and restarted the computer. Here are the results thus far: 1) The computer still runs extremely slow; and 2) Neither IE6 nor Netscape will open any web pages; instead we get the "not found" error message. Now what? HELP!!!

[glc]

You may be looking at a reinstall. No antivirus for a few months? I think you may have done yourself in.

Housecall found all that with McAfee installed? Just goes to reinforce my opinion that McAfee is almost worthless - or you never updated the new McAfee and did a full system scan after you installed it.

Your best chance is a system restore - if you have any restore points old enough to not be infected. You better do a Housecall on your son's computer too - a lot of these worms are network-aware.

[Jack Albers]

Our son's computer had 168 virus/worm infections on it!!! Unfortunately, he had no AV software at all on that PC... DUH! I definitely think we're looking at an XP reinstall in that case because I wouldn't know where a safe restore point could be on it.

Oddly enough, when I ran HouseCall on this computer (my personal system), it came up absolutely clean--and the only AV I ever ran on it was McAfee 6.0. The only other thing I did regularly was to download and install all the Windows updates from MS. Even so, we're seriously considering buying a copy of PC-cillin. Thanks so much folks!

[glc]

It may also be time for holding a class with your kids concerning safe computing.