This has been a FAQ on this newsgroup. See this site for possible help and
more information:
http://inetexplorer.mvps.org/answers/41.html
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
You may also want to check out StartPage Guard -
http://pjwalczak.com/spguard/index.php
StartPage Guard protects your PC from cyberscam, by monitoring status of
your internet browser StartPage and preventing it from any unauthorized
changes.
And to keep from having to manually edit the registry to unlock your
homepage settings, try this little script by Doug Knox, MS MVP:
http://www.dougknox.com/security/scripts_desc/nosethomepage.htm
More information here:
http://www.cexx.org/hphijack.htm