Invalid Syntax Error in IE?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Derek
  • Start date Start date
D

Derek

Hello,

I have got stumped on a recent problem that I'm seeing on one system. The
system connects to the network, has an IP, can ping out to yahoo.com via DNS
etc. But type any address into IE and you receive an "Invalid Syntax Error"
It appears to add some garbage characters to the URL like "/?%20" after the
http.

Anyone seen anything like this before?

Thanks,
Derek
 
This may be caused by spyware/malware that's gotten installed on
your system. Use Ad-Aware and/or Spybot Search & Destroy to remove it.

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/Darnit.htm
http://www.doxdesk.com/parasite/ - runs a little script when loading page to
check for common parasites

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

Also check your registry settings are as they should be per this site:
http://inetexplorer.mvps.org/answers_8.htm#extension
 
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