Uninstalling and installing Internet Explorer

I am trying to help someone who has a computer with Windows ME and is no longer able to access secure web sites. I searched for help on that and found a long list of things to try. Right now I'm concentrating on repairing or reinstalling IE. He has IE 5.5 so I thought I might as well upgrade him to IE 6.
When I go to the control panel/ add-remove programs I do not see Microsoft Internet Explorer listed so I don't know how to repair or uninstall it. I downloaded IE 6 from my computer onto a CD. If I try to install it on his computer I get a message that Windows IE setup was unable to download information about installation sites and something about his current proxy settings.

If I try to uninstall Norton Internet Security on his computer I get a message {a93c9e60-29b6-49da-ba21-f70ac6aade20} has caused an error in ASCOMPBR.DLL. I don't promise that I copied that correctly.

Any suggestions?

 

Hi,,
To uninstall ie you can use IEradicator which you can get from majorgeeks.com

Major Geeks

Not used it myself, but a colleague at work has and I am pretty sure it worked for him.

mind you should be able to upgrade explorer without removng it.

Hope this helps.

 

Do you have all of the IE6 files on the cd or just the setup file? It sounds as if you have just the setup file and it needs to download the rest of it. If it's just the setup file, you can download the entire thing on your puter and then burn that to a cd. When you first run the setup file choose custom installation and you'll then be able to download all of IE6 for installing later.

I'm not sure what to make of the proxy settings thing. Is your friend using Norton's firewall? If so, check to make sure it's not blocking IE's setup file.

 

rusty2--

That is a very specific problem and playing around with uninstalling/reinstalling IE seems not the right approach. (though i agree that IE 6 is better than IE5x)
You might try the ideas here.
http://www.duxcw.com/faq/win/xp/secure.htm
Lots of other references
http://www.google.com/search?source...4-31,GGLD:en&q=IE+cannot+access+secure+sites+
If you can fix the secure sites thing and still have the other problems, we can work on those then.

 

Blackheart - Thanks for suggesting Major Geeks. While there I got distracted by finding solutions to a number of minor issues that have been annoying me. That delayed me from replying to you and the others who were kind enough to suggest solutions. I'll let you know if IEradicator works when I get to it.

Zander - You were correct in that I just had the setup file. I tried to run it from my computer but it told me I already had a more up-to-date version of IE. When I tried to run it from his computer I got the message,
"Windows IE setup was unable to download information about available installation sites. Setup may have been unable to use your current proxy settings. Check advanced if you know your proxy settings. "

Although he had Norton Internet Security, I unchecked almost everything from his startup file. He has dialup so he isn't connected that often.

Welshjim - AT&T Worldnet (his ISP) gave me a long list of things to try. I finished all but repairing IE and one registry item I'll mention in a second. That's why I was concentrating on IE now. I went to the lists you provided. Many of the items were also on Worldnet's so I already tried them. Others apply to XP and not ME. When I go to Internet Options or the control panel I don't see the items on the list on ME.

Examples: Unckeck enable third party browser extensions
Control panel/ Adminstrative tools
Both are items I couldn't find.

AT&T suggested extracting three files while in safe mode. Two of them gave me messages that the extraction succeeded;the third did not..
The files that succeeded:
rsabase.dll
schannel.dll

The one that did not give a succeed message
rsaenh.dll

He cannot access secure sites when he uses firefox or netscape either.

Thanks to all of you for your suggestions. I'll keep trying.

 

New problems appeared on this computer daily. It looked more and more that we would have to reformat and start over. We decided that it didn't make sense to reinstall Windows ME. He wanted a new version of Office anyway. For not much more than buying XP and Office he was able to buy a new computer with desired software and with features the old one lacked.

Sometimes on just has to give up and not waste any more time.
e
Thanks again to all who helped.

 

Thanks for the update and FWIW, I think the decision was a good one.

 

End of story:

Even though he bought a new computer (a laptop) he still uses the old one for some tasks, especially financial programs where the keypad is helpful. More problems kept occurring. The lastest was that Excel hung on opening. I could not reinstall or repair Excel even with the CD. Tracing the error messages led me back to trying to uninstall Norton Internet Security (NIS). I see that my very first message here says that I tried to do that but received an error message. This time I persisted even though I was unsuccessful with add/remove programs. I downloaded SymNRT from the Symantec web site and finally removed NIS. After that, Excel worked and he could once again access secure web sites- the problem that started this thread. Disabling Norton was not enough - it needed to be removed completely.

 

rusty2--Thanks for posting back. That is good news and helpful info for us all. I had forgotten about SymNRT.