Hi Engel,
This is not a restricted account. However, I just found the cause of the
problems. I started tracing files that were installed the day I experienced
the problem yesterday and found that 3 suspicious files installed on my PC -
mssearchnet.exe, mscornet.exe and nvctrl.exe. They seemed to be the cause of
my Start Page constantly being reset to blank even though I've changed it to
another webpage. These exe files load on normal boot so I had to rename them
after booting up in Safe Mode since Windows did not allow me to delete or
rename the file since the files are being accessed.
The other problem that I faced was after I start up IE, the webpage always
loaded this webpage -
www.todaywarning.com. This is an advert for an
antispyware software. I isolated the problem to an add-on in IE pointing to a
tmp file - hpD5BE.tmp. BTW, all those files are installed on
c:\windows\system32 folder.
I should also say that part of the credit should also belong to MS
AntiSpyware since it helped me confirm that mscornet.exe and nvctrl.exe were
rougue when they pointed me to the Regedit path. Yep, it went into the
Windows registry and specified that the 3 exe files should run when IE is
invoked. It is strange though that AntiSpyware can't clean it up though coz
it always reported the bug and that it's clean it but that never happened
since the registry remains unchanged.
So if there's anyone out there facing similar problems, I hope this helps.
Regards,
Sean
