Redirected dell.msn.com on Windows 7 Machines

I tied all these steps and others as suggested on this site and elsewhere to no avail. However, after much experimentation I found a solution for me. I have a new M6500 with Windows7 64bit and IE8. The steps I used were:

1. From the Safety button on the toolbar, enable InPrivate Browsing
2. Set home page to www.msn.com
3. From the Safety button, select Delete browsing history.
4. Uncheck "Preserve Favorites website data", select everything else.
5. Select "Delete"
6. Visit home page
7. Disable InPrivate Browsing

I have even been able to revisit dell.msn.com without the problem re-occuring. It would appear, by all the accounts out there, that one fix is not for all. So many variables at play, build date of machine, machine model, OS version, IE8 version. It appears the way in which this is implemented and/or removed is being changed periodically by Dell. That's a theory though.

Wikipedia defines Malware as: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malware
"Malware, short for malicious software, is software designed to infiltrate a computer system without the owner's informed consent. The expression is a general term used by computer professionals to mean a variety of forms of hostile, intrusive, or annoying software or program code.[1] "

By my, and many other frustrated users', assessment this is nothing short of malware. By permanently redirecting www.msn.com to dell.msn.com without informed consent and/or without providing a means to readily and easily remove the behavior constitutes  "annoying software or program code", hence Malware.

Hopefully Dell will listen to its customers and correct this ill-advised practice.

Good Luck!

CW1983

Thanks,  I have been searching for a fix all day on the net.  I've tried deleting cookies multiple times with no results.   Your fix seems to have worked.  

Thanks, this worked for me as well, also after I had tried many other supposed solutions unsuccessfully. I wish DELL would do as you suggest.

First, this worked like a charm for me using W7 and IE9.

Even stress tested before this reply. After going through the steps and getting rid of what I also would call Malware, I changed the home site away from www.msn.com to www.google.com and then restarted computer. Homepage was still google, and when I go to www.msn.com I don't get that dell.msn redirect.

Thanks!!

CW1983 - I just followed your 7 steps on a brand new Dell XPS 15z laptop that just arrived today (June 22, 2012) and your solution posted in 2010 actually worked!

I hate to sound so surprised, but there are a bunch of supposed "solutions" to this out there in Google searches (some of which are more complex) that do not work. Some of them even require registry editing and then still fail - the problem comes back after reboot.

But YOUR quick 7-step approach was simple, easy, fast, and worked like a charm. I've rebooted a couple times and clicked the "Home" button in my browser and I get the true un-tainted MSN.com page without Dell's adware and no redirect to dell.msn.com anymore.

Thanks for posting such a simple yet valuable solution!

Glad it worked out, and still seems to hold up.

Your solution even works on a new Dell XPS 15 with Windows 8!  Thanks!!!