Re: problems with IE freezing

Johnny B Good wrote: 
The message <1129153109.21702.0@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
from Iain Robinson <x@xxxxx> contains these words:


Robert Knowles wrote:

use mozilla firefox - free and far superior.

"Iain Robinson" <x@xxxxx> wrote in message news:1129143807.15065.0@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


Windows 2000 and IE 6. One day all is well - the next, well, all is not well. IE starts up and the page never loads. There isn't even any
progress bar down at the bottom. The connection is definitely okay. Scanned for spyware and viruses - found a few sywares but nothing serious I
think. Got rid of them obviously. Looked about on the web and lots of people
have had this problem but none of their solutions have worked for me. Most involve reinstalling IE (didn't work), or doing a repair install of Windows
itself (ditto). The other weird symptom is that a box keeps popping up saying "Server busy" and do I watch to 'switch to' another program (the start menu appears) or 'ignore' it (it comes straight back).

The machine has some other odd behaviour, presumably as IE is so integrated with the rest of the OS. Anyway, I can't get rid of this behaviour and need to - they need to use IE.

Anyone got any ideas.

cheers
Iain




I agree. I use Firefox at home and at work most of the time but this is for a PC at work that needs IE (in the accounts dept). The company intranet works "best" on IE and we'll shortly be installing an MIS that uses Sharepoint server and from what I've seen so far this is going to be an IE preferred affair. Was chuffed to see Firefox work but I'm afraid that's not a viable long term solution for this particular PC. 


 The symptoms are classic for a RAT[1] or 'Virus' of some sort. Just
because your AV and antispyware are giving your system a 'Clean Bill of
Health' is no certain indicator that this is so. I often see 'Zero Day
Threats'[2] on customer's machines which require manual intervention to
remove (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would have been proud of my efforts :-).

 I'll often make copies of the 'unidentied viruses' files to floppy to
see how long it takes the AV industry to catch up with reality. The
delay can range from hours to weeks but it does prove my diagnosis when
they do eventually catch up.

 You can use Taskmanager to peruse the process list. Any suspicious ones
that keep springing back to life after being stopped will be such
unwanted parasites (they usually come as a pair of processes, each
riding shotgun for the other).

 Once you've identified the files, you usually need to restart in
safemode or the minimalised diagnostic mode offered by msconfig before
it's possible to delete the offenders. You'll also need to remove the
run entries from the registry and check the programs/startup for any
unwanted links after you've let msconfig restore the system settings.

 Even after all this trouble, you may still find yourself stuck with an
'unwanted guest' process (trojan). You can thank winXP's
"Sophistication" for this, especially if the boot partition is NTFS.

 If winXP (or win2k) is installed on a FAT32 partition, you do at least
stand a chance of bypassing the "Viruses' Friend" by booting from a DOS7
(win95osr2 or higher) boot floppy and wading into the otherwise
inaccessable parts of the file system where the viruses like to hide.

 The process involved in manually removing 'viruses' can become a whole
lot more convoluted than the above basic description indicates but I'm
not about to publish a virus removal tutorial in this thread, especially
as it's always going to be a 'Work in Progress'.

 Regarding alternatives to IE, I can't understand why Firefox seems to
be recommended despite it having outstanding unfixed CERT advisaries.
Although it fares much better than IE in this respect, there is an
alternative with _no_ CERT advisaries, let alone oustanding ones and
this, of course, is Opera.

 Since the whole point of using an IE alternative is to eliminate the
security issue, I'm surprised that Opera gets overlooked in favour of a
less secure alternative.

HTH


Thanks for your reply Johnny. I have become quite familiar with removing unwanted stuff from PCs over the last couple of years so I ran 'autoruns' (from Systernals) and analysed any entries I wasn't sure of against a database on the web. There were no suspicious entries. This was running in 'normal' Windows - can't remember if I did it in 'safe mode with networking' or not, but you'd presumably expect to see nasties in normal mode. I'll have a look tomorrow at all the tasks running - I didn't see any suspicious ones but I didn't actually check them against a database.

I don't feel this is an unwanted guest problem but it certainly does behave like one. Don't know if I mentioned this before or not but IE works okay in safe mode.

Iain
.