fields/"buttons" not functioning

  • Thread starter Thread starter Hoss
  • Start date Start date
H

Hoss

Using Vista Home Basic / IE7.

Two days ago I started having problems with some (but not all)
fields/boxes/"buttons" failing to appear or function. I don't know the
technical lingo but will provide a few examples:

My wife uses AOL for her e-mail; she goes to www.aol.com and then clicks on
"sign in" to log in. When she gets to the login screen there are normally
boxes to enter "username" and "password". Not now--the "Sign in" header is
there although in a different font, but the boxes as well as the "username"
and "password" labels are missing.

Another example: when I open IE7 and navigate to Google, typically the
cursor is then in the Google search box, ready to start entering terms.
Since this problem began, when I go to Google the cursor remains in the
"address" bar at the top of the screen, and I have to tab several times to
get down to the search box. (The search box looks "off", too...like only the
left and bottom sides are showing.)

At first I thought it might be an IE7 issue, but it exists in some other
programs. For example when opening McAfee, a big blank box opens with none
of the graphics/buttons/etc. that should be there. And if I open AOL
(itself, not through IE) the little arrow buttons on the welcome screen that
move you through the day's headlines don't work--they open a new "Welcome
3.0" screen. And if you click the arrow again, it opens another "Welcome
3.0" screen.

I have restored to two system restore points before the date of the problem.
Both times everything worked as it should after the restore and
reboot--until I reboot again. Once I reboot a second, the problems reappear.

I had cleaned up cookies in IE the day before the problem started, that's
the only thing out of the ordinary I can think of. Any ideas would be
greatly appreciated. Thank you.
 
In IE, Tools menu, "Manage Add-ons" you may be able to disable the add-on
that is doing that.
 
I did another system restore (I had to, to read your reply...yet another
symptom of the problem is that it will not show a list of messages, only a
blank page) and compared the list of add-ins "before and after" and there was
no difference, unfortunately I fear that's not it. But thank you for the
suggestion.
 
I have a little more info on my problem (which I haven't been able to fix).

I find that if I right click on the IE icon and select "Run as
Administrator", the buttons show up and everything works fine (after I get
past the little warning box asking me if it's OK to run the program, which is
a minor annoyance, I hoped I could find a way to disable that for just that
program but haven't figured that out yet). Bu I find it interesting that it
seems all the right information to make the program run correctly is still in
my computer somewhere, it's just not finding it when I run it as myself!

I tried giving myself ("User") the same permissions as "Administrator" in
the hope that would help; it didn't.

I installed Safari and that works fine as a browser, so I've been using that
for the most part. But I had the same problem as you with Firefox, it just
duplicated the original IE7 problem.

I've been trying to work myself up to reinstalling Vista, but can't quite
build up the steam...
 
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