Browsers suddenly won't load, XP SP2

Starting today, neither of my browsers, IE6 of Firefox 3.0.3 (the default) will load. There must something in common with both, since they were both affected at the same time. Worked fine yesterday. I ran some Spybot and AdAware before shutting down. Today, after booting up, FF started loading, then just sat there with the progress bar stopped halfway and the loading circle stopped. Had to shut down the FF process with the three finger salute. Tried IE6 and it comes up with the error and apology that it needs to shut down (no way of sending an error report since the browser won't open.)

I've spend an entire day scouring the web for a solution but can't come up with one. One MS support document suggested running sfc /scannow-- to no avail. Then I tried reinstalling IE6 from the orig. SP2 disk by running %systemroot%\inf, and right clicking install from disk ie.inf in the windows\inf.folder according to directions.

Tried a lot of other things to, to no avail. Fortunately, everything else including my Eudora email client works fine. I have a live internet connection. The computer can ping sites download various software updates as long as they don't need a web browser to do so.

Since both my browsers are dysfunctional, there must be a common or shared registry entry, file or dll that got corrupted. (This is being written on a different computer--both identical Dell Dimension 9100s w/ 4 GB ram and 260 HDs.

Since they're configured pretty much the same, and both browsers work fine on this computer, but not the other one that I described, I wonder if anyone has any ideas about what settings I can restore perhaps by copying some files from this computer with the working browsers and overwriting corrupt ones the to the one with the defunct browsers. Or at least where to look that the browsers may have common files or reg. entries.

Thanks in advance...

Frustrating!

 

Thanks, my Firefox 3.0.3 issue is now resolved. However, I still cannot figure out why IE 6 will not work anymore. Unfortunately, some municipal sites require IE in order to function properly, even though IE 6 is a piece of junk.

What the hell happened to make it stop working I wonder. No big loss, except every on in a while, FF is not recognized, as in some town GIS sites--hope that will change...

 

You might try a FF addon called User Agent Switcher. It spoofs your browser so the site thinks you are using IE. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/59