A friend of mine asked me to look at his computer. He was complaing that all of a sudden he could not access the internet. He said he was just getting recurring pop ups. I thought the same thing you are going to think (spyware or something got installed). I didn't even bother looking at IE. I just took his computer, ran several spyware removers (Ad-Aware, Spysweeper and Spybot) with no results besides tracking cookies. I ran Norton AV with no hits either. Hmmm, thats odd. So I clicked on the IE icon on the desktop to see what the error message was. To my surprise, I realized it was an actual Microsoft error message.

 

It went something like this......An error has occurred, blah blah blah, send a report to microsoft "Ok" or "Cancel". This particular pop up had a radio box that was checked that said "Restart Internet Explorer". I tried everything including sending a report to Microsoft. Each time the box would reappear. When I unchecked the the box, it did not come back. Ok, it was doing what it was supposed to do. So I did all the usual things. I reinstalled IE 6 from the web, Uninstalled all critical updates, reinstalled them. I tried to install an older version of IE with no luck as it would not let me. I even tried deleting the IE directory and registry keys and reinsatll things. No luck, same error message every time.

 

Perplexed, I installed Firefox from CD. Opened it and started surfing. No problems in Firefox. HMMMM, now I'm really curious. I have confirmed the NIC card works, and the internet is accessible through different programs. Messing around, I opened Windows Explorer and noticed an "Internet xplorer" icon in the left side (folders pane). I clicked on it and to my surprise, Windows Explorer turned to Internet Explorer and surfed the web. I was able to open any page I wanted by typing it in the address bar. I think I can now say I have seen everything. Encouraged, I closed this window and clicked on the icon on the desktop. Bam, crash and burn again. What the BEEP.

 

Ok, so now I find some information on the net about the shell32.dll being a possible culprit, no luck. I swapped it out with a copy from my Win98 cd. Same thing. I read that Critical update KB891711 may be the cause. No luck. I removed it and all of the other critical updates and tried various reboots. Nada.

 

Ok, Now I'm mad. I pull out the Windows 98 Cd and reinstall it over the existing setup. An hour later, all is done and I click on IE. Boom. Nothing, same error message. At this point I'm pulling my hair out. I HATE WIN98 (not really but I was mad). I figure the reinstall over the old setup recognized that 6.0 was installed and skipped the older version. Now, since MS has decided that us mere mortals should never want to "GO BACK" and allow older versions to be installed over newer versions, I have no option but to slick the hard drive and reinstall Windows. This I don't want to do just yet. This is a friends computer and I hate reinstalling other peoples computers clean like that.

 

Any ideas. It is an older computer, Dell L667 or something like that. 600 or 700 something mhz cpu, 20gb hard drive. Everything else works fine. Just all of a sudden, IE does not work. I'm considering tellilng him to just use Firefox but these people are computer dummies and anything out of the ordinary will totally mess them up.