You know what I hate? I hate internet Explorer. What a freaking pain in the ass! I’m too tired to think about it now but apparently someone/something is trying to hijack IE? “about:blank” keeps popping up as the home page.
I’ve used Ad-Aware, no help, and Toolbar Cop doesn’t seem to be catching anything.
I’m at the point and I want to use Mozilla and remove and burn everything that is IE. Is that possible? Can IE really be killed? 
I don’t know if it can be ‘killed’ as such. I just use Mozilla alla times. But for some stuff (links in MSN Messenger, Outlook, Windows Update etc) IE pops up.
Try these web sites that are very usefull. I love these sites.
http://www.dougknox.com/xp/xp_tips.html
That one above helps you disable some microsoft crap.
and this ones pretty good but you probably know it.
Good luck.
I don’t even bother with OE anymore, it is just as bad as IE. I use Mozilla Thunderbird for my e-mail. No complaints.
While on the topic, when I downloaded Firefox on this machine, I had the same problem with IE opening in all the programs that link to the net. I went to Add/Remove programs and than to Add/Remove Windows Components, and apparently you can remove IE. When I tried this, it actually did remove all of the icons and shit for IE and used Firefox for the default browser on some links, but MSN still continues to open my inbox through IE. Ever gay.
One of the best ones that I use is Incredimail.
And dat’s the bottom lion. 
This will fix the about: blank BS, you’ve been nailed by coolwebsearch.
maxit.net/software/CWSHREDD.EXE
download it to your desktop, run it, then run AdAware. That will fix it.
and stay away from those nasty websites!! find a real person to do it with… 
Thanks for the tips.
And it wasn’t me on "those nasty websites!! ".
And I do have “a real person to do it with”.
So there
Glad it helped. We fixed four people this week with the same problem.
none of them looked at those kinda sites either
grrrrrrrr I let someone on my computer for 5 minutes… and now I’m bombarded by popups in IE too. I never use IE for anything except checking hotmail, so now it’s got a nice lil search bar at the top, and popups come out of nowhere.
I tried that shredd.exe and it said I was clean. Any other places I can check out?
Look in Add/Remove programs for crap like MyWebsearch etc.
Also check start/programs/startup to see if it snuck in there. I don’t like to have anything at all in there unless I put it in.
Then do AdAware update & run. Seems like 99% of people just click YES for everything they see, doesn’t it?
I looked in add/remove first thing… nothing in there out of the ordinary, and there’s nothing in startup either. I ran Ad-Aware, Spybot and that shredd.exe and nothing came up for it at all.
There has only been one program I installed recently, and it was after the toolbar showed up… so I have no idea where it’s coming from.
you could try Toolbar Cop:
maxit.net/software/ToolbarCop.exe
haven’t really tried it, I don’t use IE anymore…
doesn’t work
been dere
done dat
16 pound sledgehammer time.
Is there a way I can make all my MSN stuff pop up in Mozilla instead? Checking hotmail, opening links etc etc etc.
I have found that no, you cannot do that. Microsoft wants to use Microsoft stuff. I do find it odd that when I removed IE through Add/Remove Windows Components, IE still exists.
Trillian? I use it for MSN and ICQ… also does AIM