can't open IE/ get online...

I'll try to make this brief and to the point. The post below by me (actually the post I made yesterday that was merged with the post below) was on behalf of my boss and his home system, So all the other entries regarding my hijackthis log are moot...

Here is the problem...he cant get on the internet without so many popups he cant do anything. In fact some popups were full screen and he could not open IE. I went to his house and ran ctl/alt/del to see what was running in the background....he had the following:

virtual bouncer
addestroyer
explorer pop3trap pcciomon
easyshare
mmod
webtrap
msbb
dw
bargains
kodakccs
stimon
systray
mdm
sahagent

OK..so went went one by one and removed them (except DW which gave a black screen and froze up)... now we rebooted and then Presto! we were able to get online. We D/L and installed spybot and adaware .. spybot returned with 339 items! removed them, went to adaware and got a few others (I cant remember).
rebooted...now we cant get him online. Call the DSL troubledesk and they asked if he had D/L any popup removal software (we had) and he said to uninstall that and try again...

We had the google toolbar popupblocker installed, and one other ( I cant remember)...

Now he still cant get online. We unplugged the power to the DSL modem. We rebooted. We checked with the tech for the proper settings for the DSL and all is fine. Now there are no popups on the desktop, performance (WIN98SE) went from 77% to 86%, but IE says something like "cannot find server" or something similiar.
What next?

 

I'm guessing it's your winsock. Try this fix.

 

Winsock often needs repaired after removing some spyware entries. WinsockFix.zip direct download. 666KB so will fit on floppy.

EDIT
Beat me to it Daisy! Have three links for it and was checking for one that would fit on floppy.

 

Good thinking noahdfear

 

thanks for the advise...

I forgot to mention..the DSL tech said that if my friend had D/L a popup removal, it could have effected IE and the connection to the point where he would have to have his system "fixed" by a tech...

I dont understand that one...

 

Go ahead and try the Winosck fix devildog#4, if it doesn't work...we'll deal with that later.

 

Ditto

 

it works!

Thanks Daizy & noahdfear!

After all that it is working! We D/L the utility and ran it. Now we have one smaller issue...

1. He has 7 "virtual bouncer" programs running. (they did not get recognized by ad-aware). We ran spy-bot, but froze at the C2 loop. We are trying to fix that freeze now. Maybe spy-bot will detect the virtual bouncer after we fix the c2loop freeze. I wonder why ad-aware didn't find it?

thanks for any input...

 

Should be able to uninstall virtual bouncer from add/remove. End task on all instances in task manager first. Then delete the folder if left behind. If all else fails, post a HijackThis log.