Internet Explorer errors

Hello, I'm coming here after asking around at three small communities, and could not receive the answer I was looking for.

I'll try to give a good bit of information.

I currently browse with Firefox, but it comes down to some of those times when you need Internet Explorer for a few websites. But, when attempting to connect to ANY website, it will attempt to open the page, and open the page with an extra www. and try every extension. For example, if I tried to load www.majorgeeks.com in Internet Explorer, the info bar at the bottom would display:

Opening page: www.majorgeeks.com
Opening page: www.www.majorgeeks.com.org
Opening page: www.www.majorgeeks.com.net
Plus a few other extensions. After five or so, it will then attempt to go to an auto.search.msn website, but that also fails, and it ends up displaying a pop up message box "Internet explorer could not open the search page" then displaying a "The page cannot be displayed" in the browser. It does the same when trying a different website. But, the third time on attempting a website, it will just keep refreshing "127.0.0.1" on the info bar at the bottom.

As far as I know, I'm not behind any firewalls. I have the Windows XP service pack 1, and I've received every windows update except for SP2. I have the firewall unchecked in internet settings. I've attempted to modify the Internet Explorer options. I also deleted cache, cookies, etc, and reset the internet explorer settings. Nothing seemed to work.

 

This is like saying "I have all the updates except for the most important ones". Unless you have software the is incompatible with SP2, then you should update. If you do have software that is incompatible with SP2, then you need to start looking for alternatives. Support for XP SP1 terminates on October 10th of this year. That's 6 months from now.

If I had to guess, though, I suspect IE has been hijacked by a BHO. That's assuming the problem is just with IE. Open up a command prompt and run:
nslookup www.majorgeeks.com

You should get:
Name: www.majorgeeks.com
Address: 67.19.72.101

If you don't then there's more serious things afoot. If you do, then it's almost certainly an IE problem. In any case, I suspect your best bet would be to head over the the Malware Removal forum and follow the basic cleanup instructions in the sticky.

 

Yep, that's what I get.

My current BHOs are:

O2 - BHO: AcroIEHlprObj Class - {06849E9F-C8D7-4D59-B87D-784B7D6BE0B3} - C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 6.0\Reader\ActiveX\AcroIEHelper.dll
O2 - BHO: (no name) - {243B17DE-77C7-46BF-B94B-0B5F309A0E64} - C:\Program Files\Microsoft Money\System\mnyside.dll
O2 - BHO: PBlockHelper Class - {4115122B-85FF-4DD3-9515-F075BEDE5EB5} - C:\Program Files\SlipStream Web Accelerator\PBHelper.dll
O2 - BHO: SSVHelper Class - {761497BB-D6F0-462C-B6EB-D4DAF1D92D43} - C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.5.0_06\bin\ssv.dll
O2 - BHO: NAV Helper - {BDF3E430-B101-42AD-A544-FADC6B084872} - c:\Program Files\Norton AntiVirus\NavShExt.dll

I've always disliked the service pack 2. The only thing it ever did for me was increased my ping and packetloss in online games.

I will look at the malware section.

 

ADDITION:

Okay, I've got it. This is really embarrasing. I had the "Use a proxy for this connection" under the connection settings in the IE settings.

Man, and I just downloaded about 25 megs of spyware utilities. At least I'm protected now.

Thanks anyway da chicken.

 

WinXP SP2 did have performance issues initially, but AFAIK they've been resolved. My understanding was that a few of the issues were related to some of the fixes in SP2 (and have mostly been resolved), but just as many were related to drivers that weren't entirely compatible with the newer components. Particularly network drivers, since the TCP/IP stack had been revised so much. If memory serves, the performance issues were nothing like those that happened when SP1 was first released.

The only issue I see people have problems with is the 10 half-open connections limit (a la Event ID 4226), and that's only with P2P apps that create so many connections so quickly. I can't remember if this was an XP SP1 or SP2 fix, either.