IE6 wont submit searches to google or yahoo (page brought up but submit does nothing). Wont redirect to technet. Cant login at hotmail. Netscape 4.7 however works fine. Javascript enabled (confirmed).

Hi,

This is a curly one. Basically something on the computer is telling IE what sites it can and can't go to. Sort of like a virus. The problem was first noticed when the laptop in question was moved from one domain to another. Everything went fine until I went to search for something on google. The google website came up, I entered in my search terms etc and pressed enter - nothing happened. So I pressed the submit button - still nothing happened.

Initially I thought that javascript must have been turned off - but it hadn't. So then I went to our companies website which I know uses javascript for logins etc and I didn't have any problems. So I thought that google was having problems. So I went to Yahoo to do my search - again the same thing happened - I could enter in my query but my search didn't do anything. The little windows flag (in the top right corner) didn't move a muscle. So I tried to do a search on lycos - there I had no problems - I could search away to my hearts content.

So then I tried to lookup this problem on technet. Normally when I go to technet I type in www.microsoft.com/technet which then redirects me to the proper site. This time it did nothing. Yet when I typed in support.microsoft.com I was able to search the knowledge base. This was the first time that I noticed that the browser was doing funny stuff irrespective of javascript.

So I installed Netscape 4.7 and low and behold I had no problems going to any of the above sites and performing searched etc.

Because I thought that maybe I had done somethign horribly wrong when I changed the domain the computer belonged to I decided to do a system restore (to the one that I had made earlier). When I did this and logged back on to the previous domain, I had not problems at all. YET when I logged on to the computers local domain IE demonstrated the same behaviour.

So I did two complete virus scans using Symantec's online scanner and McCaffee's Virus Scan - nothing was found. I then used Lavasofts Ad-Aware to see if there was some sort of trojan etc grabbing my search text and forgetting to forward it on to the appropriate website - again nothing was found. I even viewed the source of googles front page and compared it with that downloaded from another computer on the same network that uses the same gateway to access the internet and found them to be exactly the same.

Other things that I have tried - check to see what security zone IE thinks im in on these websites (all internet zone). Made sure that no sites were listed in any zone (like say restricted). Reset all settings (to the best of my knowledge) to their defaults. Delete all tempory files and cookies etc.

What do I think's happened. I think that there is some pluggin that has infected IE and is catching the requests to certain sites and not forwarding them on to the gateway/web server. Note that Netscape has never demonstrated this problem - which to my understanding tends to suggest the problem lies closer to IE than say a system infection. I did use msconfig to set the computer to restart without processing the startup items and win.ini etc etc.

Other things that I have noticed - I can't go to www.google.com/nfr (whether I type it in, click on a link in an email that I sent myself or click on the link off the google website). (when I go to www.google.com I get redirected to www.google.com.au). I can however go to www2.google.com and www3.google.com.

The computer specs are:

  Dell Inspiron 8500
  P4 2.4G, 512 MB, 40GB
  Windows XP SP1

  Windows updates applied each week.
  McCaffee virus definitions updated each week.

What is my question? How do I fix this problem ;-) It's very annoying and alarming (I don't want other computers catching whatever this one's got).

Thanks heaps in advance,

Andy