IE running, but not showing

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G

Guest

I use IE6 in WinXP.

Just today, I tried several times to launch IE. The eggtimer showed only
momentarily. In Task Manager processes, several IE processes are running. But
in the applications tab, IE does not appear.

Several reboots have not helped. All other applications, including Firefox,
seem OK.

Please advise.

Regards,
Alan
 
Remove it and install it back from Add-Remove Programs - Add/Remove Windows
Componenets. OR Update it to IE7
 
This may be caused by spyware/malware that's gotten installed on
your system. Use Ad-Aware, Windows Defender and/or Spybot Search & Destroy
to remove it.

Windows Defender (beta)
http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/spyware/software/default.mspx
Ad-Aware: http://www.lavasoftusa.com/
Spybot: http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html
Good sites on how to install and use Spybot -
http://www.safer-networking.org/en/tutorial/index.html
http://tomcoyote.com/SPYBOT/index1.php

Also download a winsock repair tool, to have just in case cleaning up
anything found breaks it -

Winsock repair tools:
LSPFix- all versions of Windows http://www.cexx.org/lspfix.zip
Winsock2 Fix- Win98, ME
http://www.bu.edu/pcsc/internetaccess/winsock2fix.html
LavaSoft- all versions of Windows-
http://digital-solutions.co.uk/lavasoft/whndnfix.zip

More information here:
http://www.spywareinfo.com/
http://inetexplorer.mvps.org/tshoot.html
http://spywarewarrior.com/sww-help.htm

If no joy, in IE go to Tools...Internet Options...Advanced tab, Browsing
section, uncheck "Enable third-party browser extensions", click Apply, click
Okay, reboot. If that solves your problem, then more troubleshooting is
needed to find out exactly which program, or Browser Helper Object (BHO) is
causing this problem. You don't want to leave it at that, as some BHOs are
useful or necessary - like Adobe Acrobat for reading .pdf files or an
essential component of Norton AV. Get BHODemon -
http://www.definitivesolutions.com/bhodemon.htm - read all about BHOs.
Disable all items, and then gradually replace one or two at a time to narrow
down the culprit.

Or if you have IE 6 SP-2 you can do this within the browser:
How to manage Internet Explorer add-ons in Windows XP Service Pack 2
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;883256

If all the above fails, then the problem could be something new that the
spyware cleaners above don't have in their databases yet. In that case....
HijackThis direct download:
http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/files/hijackthis.zip
Tutorial on how to use HijackThis:
http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/htlogtutorial.html
Then post it's output log to the forum here for analysis and feedback by the
parasite experts:
http://www.spywareinfo.com/forums/
Or the other HijackThis Logs forums listed here:
http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/forums.html

Or try this program to get some of the most nasty malware:
CWShredder direct download:
http://aumha.org/downloads/cwshredder.zip

An alternate resource for all of this and more:
http://www.aumha.org/secure.htm
 
I uninstalled and reinstalled IE. This solved the problem immediately, but
the problem returned a few days later.

Thanks anyway.

Regards,
Alan
 
Thanks for the detailed response.

Before your post, I had previously used Spware Doctor. It found and removed
2 items.

I then used AdAware. It found nothing.

I tried SpyBot. It found 94 items :)

However, removal of these items did not solve the problem.

I then disabled the browser extensions. This worked.

I re-enabled the extensions. The problem returned.

I re-disabled. This works.

Since I only use IE as a front end for my accountant's web-based accountancy
software, I don't need extensions.

I use FireFox for all other internet use.

Many thanks for your help.

Regards,
Alan
 
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