IE6 Stops Responding - Task Manager Does Not Solve Problem

I visited your site about a week ago because my computer was running slow, on bootup the System Folder appeared and I was getting a periodic error message when trying to open FireFox. The error message for FireFox was "FireFox cannot open because there is another instance running. Close FireFox or restart. I looked to Task Manager and it never showed up in the processes and upon reboot I received the same error message.

I ran some of your malware removal suggestions and decided since I did not find anything of note that I would just reinstall the OS since I have had this computer for about 5 years.

Yep, reinstalled and then I started having problems with IE6 freezing up. The freeze up was complete with Task Manager being of no help to shut down the browser and eventually even the little message boxes to Send Trouble Report started to freeze. The only way to take care of the problem was to shut the computer down via the power button.

I reinstalled the OS again and I am still experiencing the same problem with IE6. I prefer FireFox but have not yet installed it until I find out what is going on with my system.

I have performed the suggested scans, they are attached to this message. I have not yet run Hijack This.

All scans were clean except for Panda. All scans were run in Safe Mode.

Please help.

 

Cripes, I'm sorry. You probably want to know the OS and the system info.

I am running WindowsXP Home Edition with SP2. All updates have been done.

Computer is a HP d330 uT (DC579AV)

Intel Pentium 4 CPU 2.40GHz
2.39GHz, 504MB RAM

 

I did a full system wipeout not a repair.

There are two disks provided with my computer. One is the Hp Restore Plus! CD. When running this CD it wipes out the system (at least it warns you of loss of all data) and then gives a prompt to create the partition. After that is complete, I was prompted to insert other disks if available, they were not, and then on to the Business Desktops OS CD - Microsoft Windows XP Home SP1.

I have a disk I received from Microsoft that contains SP2. So, after the OS was installed the first thing I did was install SP2 and then went to Windows Update.

I ran CC Cleaner last night as per the instructions on the Do This First Before Asking for Help page.

 

I did all of this before asking for help and attached it to my first post.

 

I could not run the IEFix because I could not find IE.exe on the disk from Microsoft. Go figure!

The link you provided for the Mcrepair Tool does not work. I get a "page cannot be displayed" error message.

 

Here are the scans from activescan. There are two because I scanned both the Administrator account and my account. Both scans were done in Safe Mode w/internet connection.

I also ran cc cleaner as you suggested in the above post.

I have one more issue and then I think we are done. When I go to your download page some of the words appear underlined with double red underlines. Hovering the mouse pointer over the words produces pop ups for ads. Is this something that you have on your site or do I have another problem with my computer?