Search Engine (I think) problems

I am not a technical person who has a 5 year old Dell Inspiron with XP. This morning, both Firefox and IE search engines stopped working. They were working yesterday. Yahoo still works. System restore doesn't work. I've run Norton 360 and Webroot. Both say no problems. I use Verizon FIOS and the Verizon email function works fine.
I don't have very many things on the computer and there's plenty of room. Any advice is sincerely appreciated. Thanks

 

When you start the programs what happens? Can you load any website at all? Do you get any error messages?

 

When I click on either the Firefox or IE icon, they come up. I can enter a site in the bar at the top of the screen, and the response is there; but if I enter a term in the "search" box, nothing happens.

 

So if you click on http://www.google.com then the site appears, and if you type something into the box on the google page, nothing happens?

 

when I type http://www.google.com, the google screen appears. If I type 'fios" for example in the box, everything related to fios appears. Google chrome also works. I uninstalled Firefox, then reinstalled it. I did one search which worked. Then it stopped working again. I probably don't need Firefox, it's just that I've used it for so long, and it worked so well, that I'm spoiled.

 

Georgew7510...are you referring to the Google search box built into your browser...that it doesn't work? I think what collinsl might be asking, idk, is if you go to google.com and enter something in the box on the search page there, does that work for you?

Sounds like your search toolbar could be malfunctioning...like maybe you got a redirect virus that was partially thwarted or broken by anti-virus or in some other way...

Like this perhaps:

http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/953200

 

I ran malwarebytes and also found a Firefox trouble shooting note which recommended resetting Firefox (which I did not know I could do) Between the two of them, it's working.
Thank you, thank you, thank you to all who contribute to this forum to help people like me.

 

Wasn't aware of the Firefox reset. Sounds like that probably solved your problem. Thanks for passing that on and for posting the update...