R. H. Breener said:
For the last hour IE and Mozilla Firefox have become unusable. Almost
every website bring up an Expired Certificate window and wont let the
pages load.
Those would be https web sites (that use SSL to encrypt the connection)
since http sites don't use or need site certs.
They all say This Page Is Untrusted. So neither can be updated.
Are you running anything that intercepts and perhaps interrogates your
web traffic? You're running Avast but are you running anything else?
For example, I have Applian's Replay Media Capture (RMC) and configured
it to intercept HTTPS traffic (the default setting) so I can capture
streaming video from HTTPS sources. When this is running, sometimes I
get cert errors. I'd get errors from my e-mail client (Thunderbird)
about not being able to connect using SSL to the e-mail servers. When I
used to have EMET running, it would complain all the time about cert
errors for HTTPS sites when RMC was running.
From your bogus signature below, you are using Avast. Have you tried
temporarily disabling it to see if its interception and interrogation of
your web traffic is the culprit? Do you have a 3rd party firewall
installed? If so, have you tried disabling it? What other active
security software do you have running on your computer?
Have you yet rebooted Windows? If there are pending Windows updates,
they can interfere with the operation of the OS or applications. You
didn't mention if you configured Windows Update to merely notify you of
new updates or if you left Windows configured with the default WU
setting of download and installing the updates. You could reconfigure
WU to only notify you of new updates and then download and apply them
when you are prepared, like after saving a backup image of the OS
partition. WU creates a restore point so you don't have to bother doing
that but restore points won't take you back to the exact state of the OS
partition, so save a backup image before applying updates to the OS.
Even if WU doesn't say you need to reboot after applying some updates,
do it anyway. Sometimes apps or services get in some weird state, and
I've seen hardware that won't reset properly via software but requires a
reboot. So see if a reboot of Windows fixes the problem.
If a reboot doesn't kick the problem in the butt to fix it, use msconfig
to disable all startup programs and reboot. That will eliminate a
startup program as the cause of the interferrence. If the problem goes
away, reenable each startup program one at a time, reboot, and retest.
When the problem returns, it was the last reenabled startup program that
is the culprit. And if that doesn't work then reboot Windows in its own
safe mode (but with networking enabled) to eliminate all startup
programs along with non-critical services to retest.
As a test, disable hardware (GPU) acceleration in Internet Explorer.
Too often using the GPU results in improper behavior or crashes (from
which IE may try to recover but IE is still in a limbo state). Internet
Options -> Advanced, enable software rendering (to disable hardware/GPU
rendering). The AMD/ATI drivers don't seem to do well with apps that
want to use hardware acceleration (which is only important in you play
online video/action games). I've had to disable hardware acceleration
in IE and other apps to keep them from crashing; else, after a crash, I
will trace it back to an ati* file (so the video driver or its
ancilliary files caused the crash). If the problem goes away in IE
after disabling hardware acceleration, do the same for Firefox. They
all want it enabled primarily to improve their benchmarks. This is an
iffy solution as I wouldn't expect hardware acceleration to affect
connectivity of HTTP over SSL (HTTPS) but if IE is crashing and
recovering than the recovered state may not be a usable state.
Have you yet tried loading the web browsers in their safe mode to
eliminate add-ons as a possible source of your problem? Although you
are asking about two different web browsers, you might've installed an
add-on from the same source into both of them (e.g., Adblock Plus). For
Internet Explorer, run iexplore.exe with the -extoff command-line
argument (run without extensions). I forget how to run Firefox in safe
mode but an online search would find that pretty easily.
While I don't know if such an add-on exists for IE, there is one for
Firefox that tries to always connect to a web site using SSL (HTTPS).
If it fails that connect then it degrades to an non-SSL connect (HTTP).
The idea is this add-on tries to up your security by trying to use an
encrypted connection to the site whenever possible. However, SSL
resources at a web server are more "expensive" than non-SSL connects so
it is a bit rude to use SSL when it isn't needed to use a web site just
because you're scared something is sniffing your packets. If you have
such an add-on, it would be disabled for the above recommendation of
starting the web browsers in their safe mode.
Not a valid signature delimiter line (which is "-- \n", or dash dash
space newline). So everything after the fake delimiter is in the body
of your post.
This email is free from viruses and malware because avast! Antivirus
protection is active.
h**p:// www. avast. c*m
Avast, by default, will spamify your posts (and e-mails) by appending
their promotional fake signature block. Either configure Avast to not
append their spam to your post (which makes spam your post) or get rid
of the superfluous e-mail/post scanner module (it adds no further
protection over the on-access/real-time scanner).
