Internet Options "Privacy"

Recently I've experienced trouble with my internet tools. Under the per site privacy acitions ALL the sites lised have vanished. In the past when this happened all I did was reboot and all was fixed. Now I can't find anywau to correct this. Has anyone else experienced this trouble. I did not delete them manually. They just disappeared! I can not surf now unless I select "accept all cookies "

 

What OS? What IE version?

 

nelle--I agree with Newt that we need to know your versions of Windows and IE. That would allow suggestions about how to use the Internet Explorer Repair Tool, for example. Or know whether the recommendations here might apply
http://www.winguides.com/registry/display.php/797/
But I have a feeling you have virus or spyware on your PC.
Do you have an antivirus program running in the background on your PC? Have you run a scan with it? Do you have the latest virus definition files?
If no, run
http://housecall.trendmicro.com/housecall/start_corp.asp
Have you run a spyware detector?
AdAdware
http://www.lavasoft.de/support/download/
SpybotS&D
http://www.safer-networking.org/
Be sure to get the latest reference file updates before you run the scan.

 

I'm running 98 se and using Ie 6. The first thing I did was check for viruses and spyware. All came out clean. I'm also running Spyblaster and Spyguard on my machine. I haven't been able to get back the information I had set up. It's a long process of entering the cookies I want accepted. I was wondering if this had happened to anyone else and how did they correct this. I can't imagine what glitched and erased all that information! As I said earlier, in the past a reboot would correct things. Not this time. I'll keep trying. Any other suggestions are appreciated.

 

The fact that you had to reboot so often to 'fix' a problem indicates that things weren't right and have maybe gotten just a smidgen worse.

My first suggestion to anyone having really unusual issues, and especially if they are running a 9X version, is to do a good, general system cleanup. Most folks do a few of the following but very few do them all and I'd suggest you start with this list - and in the order listed. Can't hurt and I've always been amazed at the number of issues that totally vanish.

• Using Windows Explorer (or any good file manager) look in C:\ for files with a name filennnn.chk where nnnn is any number and delete any you find. File0001.chk, file0200.chk, etc.
• IE and dump all your TIF, cookies, history, etc.
• Delete contents of any \temp folders you have.
• Empty the recycle bin.
• Boot to DOS (not the command window but F8 or whatever gets you the menu at restart and select the plain DOS option).
• scanreg /fix and when that completes, scanreg /opt . You can run a combined scanreg with both options but I don't like the results as well as two runs with fix on the first one.
• scandisk /surface /nosave /autofix on each of your drives.
• win /D:M to force a safe mode boot.
• Scandisk and select standard since you already did a good surface test. This will fix any long file name problems that the DOS scandisk can't see.
• Defrag
• Reboot
• Repair IE.

If you still have problems, post back with the total number of fonts you have installed and the total number of files in c:\ including the number of folders. Not subfolders but just the number that are directly under the root directory.

 

I followed your instructions. I usually do most of them except the DOS commands, as I am not all the knowledgeable with DOS. Very interesting, I printed your instructions to use again in the future. After typing scanreg/opt the computer made some noises, and I did not get any message after the noises. Was that what was suppose to happen? I had no files ending in CHK. I have 12 folders under C: and I counted 67 fonts. I am curious why you asked? What does that information tell you? I have no idea how many files I have in C: is there an easy way to find out? The per site privacy action is working now, but I never got back what I had in it previously. I am re-entering in as I go along, which cookies to accept and which to block. Thanks for all your help.

 

Scanreg is a great utility. There is a windows version but I don't think it works as well. Your registry will get a few errors just from normal activity. The /fix switch takes care of them. Also, when you remove items from the PC that had registry entries, the entries leave but the gap remains. The /opt switch compresses the registry so it is much more efficient.

98 is quirky and if you have too many fonts loaded, it will behave badly. Same with too many entries (be they files or folders) in the root section. I think the max is a bit over 500 but it varies and too many things there will make the system burp, balk, and do other bad things.

I've been away from 98 for a long time so don't remember exactly how some things behave but I think if you do
start~run~command and then
c:\ and <ENTER> so you are at a c:\ prompt
you can just do a dir command and it will list all the files and folders directly under c:\ (which you don't care about) and at the end will give you a total of files and folders found (which you do care about). If not, one of the 9X support folks will surely know. I do mostly NT4/2K/XP/2003 these days and don't even have a 9X system around to play with.

Here is what mine looks like

Code:

03/30/2004  06:14 PM    <DIR>          Program Files
02/17/2004  04:42 PM             2,464 servers.txt
04/01/2004  07:17 PM             3,602 tasklist.txt
01/16/2004  12:58 PM    <DIR>          temp
02/16/2004  05:22 PM                39 testit.bat
01/22/2004  06:49 PM    <DIR>          web
04/14/2004  06:33 PM    <DIR>          WINDOWS
              19 File(s)        788,742 bytes
              11 Dir(s)  33,892,806,656 bytes free

The filennnn.chk files are what you get if you do a scandisk and when it says, "Hey boss, I found some problems I can fix. Do you want me to save the stuff that I fixed? ". If you say yes, you get file0001.chk. Next time you get file0002.chk. I've seen systems with over 700 of those things. And they almost never have anything useful in the file. Maybe, if a database got busted and the contents lost, the parts in the filennnn.chk might be something you could use but I've only seen that happen once in the time I've been messing with PCs. Mostly they are just full of random noise.