DLL HELL ! IE is all screwd up!!!

RocketMan on 10/2/2009 at 00:01

I have Win XP SP3 and recently I noticed some instability in IE. Then to my surprised I found the firewall to be off so automatically I realized all sorts of shit probably found its way onto my machine. Firewall back up, scanned the shit out of the comp with Spybot, Norton and MalWareBytes. Destroyed everything then moved onto the registry and used 2 programs to repair that. After all that my IE is still damaged. When I start it up I get this error about the module ntdll.dll having an error and URLmon.dll has something to do with it also. It then crashes the IE and starts up again but every time I try to go to a site it either doesn't go at all or it will bring up some random spam search shit.

Example: I open IE and it goes to google (after crashing once with the dll error). I type in TTLG forums and get some results. I click on the one I always click on and instead of going to TTLG it brings up some random search engine i've never heard of and gives me ITS search results for TTLG forums. Going back and clicking again gives a different no-name search engine. It's like something's piggybacking my IE and intercepting my searches.

Anyway I can't figure out what's wrong and I have no idea what the offending software is or how to deal with it.

HELP?

bikerdude on 10/2/2009 at 00:17

Hi RM

I know this is gonna sound unhelpful, but you do know that IE6/7 is the most unsecure browser to surf the web with - case in point, yours is broken

get a mate to download a copy of firefox for you and start using that instead.

TheOutrider on 10/2/2009 at 01:01

Get (http://www.trendsecure.com/portal/en-US/tools/security_tools/hijackthis) HijackThis, post log plz kthx. HJT may be able to slap whatever's sunk its teeth into your IE, but even if it isn't at least it'll give some pointers to what it actually is.

Omega on 10/2/2009 at 18:51

While I agree that a different browser is probably a better idea. Here's another tool you might want to give a try: (http://windowsxp.mvps.org/IEFIX.htm) IEFix (Might be a bit old, but perhaps it'll work.)

RocketMan on 10/2/2009 at 22:29

Omega: Awesome! This is exactly what I need. The errors seem very similar in nature

TheOutrider: This app is pretty advanced. I see some familiar stuff and also a whole bunch of other stuff I didn't even know was there. Gave me a few ideas for what to uninstall.

Biker: Old habits die hard. I'd probably be running linux if i was after the best of everything but I like IE and windows and stuff like that no matter how sub-par they may be.

Upgraded to IE7 to try to fix the problem and it managed to stop the dll problems. All I have now is this stupid spam search engine or whatever it is coming up when i click on google hyperlinks....tolerable but just barely.

bikerdude on 10/2/2009 at 23:28

Quote Posted by RocketMan

Upgraded to IE7 to try to fix the problem and it managed to stop the dll problems. All I have now is this stupid spam search engine or whatever it is coming up when i click on google hyperlinks....tolerable but just barely.

go and download " IE7 pro " it is a very good utility for IE7, it has a flash blocker, spell checker and other handy tweaks.

TheOutrider on 10/2/2009 at 23:50

HijackThis is my first go-to point for finding out what's going on with hilariously adware-broken computers. Doesn't have a lot of automatisms, but it's a core part of my Help Me Fix My Computer Please USB stick simply because of how good it is for sniffing just about everything out.

RocketMan on 11/2/2009 at 03:04

Wouldn't it be logical to assume that microsoft would have some means of checking the URL that is actually queried vs the URL that you clicked on? Call me ignorant but it doesn't seem like it would be that hard to monitor and fix. Maybe I need to be a half decent programmer to understand...