weird windows problem

I have a friend that is having a bunch of trouble with his computer. (WINXP Pro sp2) I have had him run spybot s&d, Adaware, AVG super.. Ccleaner, bugdoctor, and HJT. We have cleaned everything we could find but all of them seem minor, and his problem still exists. He had downloaded IE 8 Beta, but he was having the same trouble with IE 7. Here are his symptoms:

Clicking on a link gives an error message "Internet explorerer has encountered a problem and needs to close". and from there the problem compounds. It seems to "infect" every instance of IE ..they all freeze and he sits with the hour glass... and "not responding" messages. If he moves anything.. it shadows itself like a deck of cards... all over the desktop and every item becomes more or less uncontrollable.

He can't move, minimize nor close anything that's on the desktop. When checking applications in the task manager, all the IE browsers are on "not responding" status. The only way to get out of this mess is by rebooting. After that, things look all right for a short while but as soon as he tries using IE by clicking a link it starts all over. One thing I noticed that if he opens IE first... he can type in the address and it seems to be ok. But, he has saved a ton of shortcuts to webpages and those will not open.

 

I haven't tried IE8 beta but IE7 has the option to start without add-ons


Start Internet Explorer with add-ons disabled. To do this, click Start, click Programs, point to Accessories, point to System Tools, and then click Internet Explorer (No Add-ons).

See if starting with no add-ons helps.

 

I would try uninstalling IE7 too and see what happens with IE6. Have you tried another browser? Firefox lets you import all the IE favorites, Opera does too.... however, using a different browser doesn't really solve the problem, but it would tell us if the problem is strictly an IE problem or if it's a deeper Windows problem.

 

Ok so we decided to set it back to default and disable most of the plugins.. It appears to be more stable.. I will post back if status changes. Thanks for the suggestions. >> PS he really likes IE 8