IE7 often slow

From the beginning ....

An old installation of Avira's free program, which I hadn't used for ages, didn't work. It was missing something or other. I downloaded it again and reinstalled on top of the old one.

From that point on I couldn't connect to the internet. I tried reinstalling the ADSL modem driver without making any difference.

I also did an XP repair, booting from the c.d. and selecting the repair option which is offered after accepting the licence agreement (not the one offered before). No difference.

On the advice from a technician at PC World I then updated the modem driver from Device Manager - no difference.

Having lost three days during which I expected important email I decided to completely reinstall XP (Home). I didn't reformat, so as not to lose existing files, and installed in the same partition as the previous installation.

Once I had both service packs and all critical updates installed, I removed the old installation from the boot.ini file and transferred old files as necessary.

I have an ADSL connection, speed 2.2Mbps.
Most web pages were reasonably quick to load. They are now noticeably slower.

Major Geeks home page was slower than I remember it being.
My home page, Google, and others are much slower, the status bar now usually showing 'Looking up' followed by 'Website found' followed by 'Waiting for'. Altogether a dismal performance.

In Firefox, 20 minutes or so ago, MajorGeeks was also quite slow to load, but it is is much swifter now when I just tried it again.

Some sites, grc.com, for instance, are incredibly slow in IE, taking minutes to get to the home page and so long trying to load the ShieldsUp page I just give up waiting. I just tried grc.com in Firefox and it just as slow in that browser too. Is this a GRC fault or one with my system?

I have tried running IE without add-ons and that doesn't improve matters.


n.b. I did, of course, flush out everything 'Avira'.

 

Did that remove the old version? I suspect uninstalling the older version first would have been the better way to go.

What does that mean? You still have Avira installed, right? If not, what anti-virus program do you have installed now?

 

I doubt it.

I don't doubt it.

I removed all traces of it.

Wrong. I removed all traces of it.

The one built in to ZoneAlarm's suite, which runs all the time.
I also have installed, and occasionally run, a-squared Free, XoftSpy SE, Spybot, PestPatrol and Ad-Aware.

And once in a while I run BitDefender's free on-line virus scan.

 

How? Did you manually remove files, folders, and even registry entries?

Take a look at Basic computer maintenance everyone should do. Be sure to use CCleaner, as suggested there.

 

I deleted the Avira folder and its contents from the hard drive.

I then used jv16's registry cleaner and then CCleaner, but not necessarily in that order. And I used jv16's registry compactor.

I have subsequently run JkDefrag.


I use CCleaner, and jv16's registry cleaner, quite frequently.

 

The problem has been solved by running Avira's registry cleaner, which looks for left-overs from their own program.

Thank you for trying to help.