Internet Explorer problem.

General Questions
#1

So i was looking at Porn. I’ve decide to be upfront about this rather than “My friend has this problem…”. I made the mistake of turning my back for a minute and when i looked at the screen again. Oh dear the last one i’d linked to was apparently what i call a ‘cascade’ site. You know what i mean , when it opens it launches another 2 pages, which open up their associated pages which etc, etc. So after a litle swearing and lots of Alt-F4’s i’m back to square one. So i open up a new window and instead of the straight Dope which was my default it’s been altered to one of the porn sites pages. Irritating but no problem. So I go into my Tools->Internet options to change it back, and what do i find? The change home page has been disabled. The top third of the General Tab is just greyed out.
:mad:
So anyone know how i can restore that or is it a case of uninstall /reinstall. I am using IE 6.0 by the way

Thanks

#2

Never mind. Fixed it myself

#3

You ought to try AdAware, free version from download.com so it can get rid of the porn stuff that was put on your HD. I just ran AdAware once then deleted it.

#4

Out of curiosity, how did you fix it?

#5

Cack-handed luck. Did a search for the text string that defined the home page on my hard-drive. In the User and System file. Opened them up with word pad and manually changed the text back to the Straight Dope home page.

Rebooted.

"Warning Registry conflict " or some such phrase crops up. Realise my manual change will conflict with the automatic back-up

:smack:

Ok, prompt comes up ‘Run "Syscheck’ (or something like that).

Whirrs away for a few seconds and announces “Restoring from earlier back-up.” Changes the files back to what they were from the last proper boot-up from before my IE settings were messed up.

And with one bound our hero was free!

Wish i could claim credit for my technical genius but hey sometimes stumbling incompetence gets the job done just as well.

#6

You might want to consider downloading the Firebird browser. It won’t allow any site to take over your home page, it blocks all popups, it has tabbed browsing and it has better security management so you can just wipe all traces of your…umm…activities away.