All right. For the past few days my email (OE) has been giving me some minor hassles. Nothing huge, but I need to attempt to send whatever mail I’m sending three or four times before it tells me it’s been sent. Annoying. Since then I’ve also noticed that when I first connect to my DSL after boot (or any other time, for that matter), my computer immediately attempts to run my browser and access a website. As I run Opera, it does not have the opportunity to, but it’s obvious that it’s trying to do so. I can’t even tell what site, because Opera makes sure my general options don’t include going to said site.
On the same end of things, I’ve run spybot, ad-aware, and AVG antivirus, getting rid of anything that looks even remotely suspicious, and I’m still having the problems. Can anyone give me advice on this? I generally consider myself pretty savvy / safe about such things, and while it’s only a minor inconvenience, it’s really getting annoying fast.
In retrospect, I enabled my browser to jump directly to the page and got… The webpage of my local DSL service provider, with whom I have an account. I find this odd… I mean, I already subscribe to them, why would they make my browser jump there as soon as I sign on? Freaky, huh?
Still having the intermittent and annoying problems with my email. Again, any and all advice would be welcome.
Many ISPs, including dialup and broadband, are turning into scum. They are encouraging/forcing subscribers to load up their machines with all sorts of malware. To do straight Internet stuff, you shouldn’t need any of that at all. TCP/IP is TCP/IP.
But they want to track you, limit you, serve you ads, and on and on. Sounds to me like your ISP got you to load a bunch of their crapware on your machine. Get rid of it if you can. And if you can’t, switch to a service that doesn’t do that.
Have you checked your startup programs? You can check these through Run>msconfig>startup tab. Look at the programs that are running when you turn on the machine and uncheck the program if you can identify it. This utility is not part of WIN 2000 but it can be installed after download.