IE, new and improved to being utterly useless!

Factual Questions
1

A while back I ‘upgraded’ to Earthlink Total Access 2005, or some such name. Supposed to include a firewall and a spam blocker and a scam blocker and all sorts of wonderfulness – all in the form of just an updated IE. Personally, I noticed no difference after switching to it.

Until this morning, when I discover that since last night apparently EVERY SINGLE SITE on the web is too dangerous for me to visit. :frowning:

No matter which address I type in or which ‘favorite’ I click on, I get a pop up window titled “Potentially Fraudulent Web Site Alert”

and in the box is:
-=-=
Do you really want to visit this potentially dangerous site?

The Web address you requested is on the EarthLink ScamBlocker list of potentially dangerous and fraudulent Web sites.
Visitors to this site may be at high risk for identity theft or other financial loses.
-=-=

Followed by Yes/No buttons.
Well, I scraped up all my courage and said, yes, open unto me this den of fraudulent and iniquitous activity. And lo and behold it did.

Revealed unto me was…my personal home page at Earthlink itself! As in, the place with links to customer service and such horrors as a google search bar, a weather report, the Word of the Day, the news headlines and all sorts of other dangers I clearly need protection from.

WTF?
And I get that window for everything. Sometimes many times: it took FOUR separate over rides to get to the point of typing in this message – two to open the top of the SD message board, one to get to general questions, one to open this entry page. It’ll probably take more to post it.

Even worse, sometimes it uses popunder windows, so you sit there thinking the web is slow this morning while everything is on hold while it warns you yet again of nonexistent dangers.

I’ve had it with IE. This is the last straw. Off to DL and install Firefox.

2

I forgot to mention: I updated and ran Spybot, then updated and ran AdAware. Both found some tracking cookies but nothing of more interest. I also have NAV2004 running, with the virus files up to date as of yesterday evening. I have Zone Alarm running.

I neither downloaded or installed anything between 1am last night (when IE was working normally) and this morning when it turned into the universe’s most overprotective browser.

Clearly something has gone wrong, my guess is it’s the ‘scam blocker’ – but I’m tired of fighting IE.
(BTW, I was right: three more over rides before I saw my message posted.)

3

Earthlink went scummy a couple of years ago. Their package installs spyware and such. So add it to the growing list of ISPs where you never ever install their software on your computer. The OP’s complaints are really about Earthlink’s scumware. IE has been awful since the day it was born.

4

There doesn’t seem to be any General Question here. This is closed.

-xash
General Questions Moderator