Hi all
I have a rather annoying problem with my laptop. Until this morning before I came to the office it was doing ok. However, after starting it up at the office (not connected to the LAN yet), it couldn't open Internet Explorer. Click on the IE shortcut, the hourglass flashes up for a second or so and then goes away and nothing happens. In case you're wondering why I'm trying to open IE when I'm not connected, I have a web-based app running on the local machine and this is what I'm trying to access through IE (and was able to do so until a few hours ago).
Looking at task manager, I noticed that as soon as I try to open IE, the IEXPLORE.EXE process comes up followed shortly by dwwin.exe (used by error reporting if I'm not mistaken). So I disabled error reporting (along with a few other non-essential services like IIS, SQL Server) and tried again, but no luck. Now when I try starting IE, IEXPLORE.EXE starts followed shortly by drwtsn32.exe and all other symptoms remain unchanged. Same thing happens under safemode.
Next up I ran Spybot, Hijackthis and Trendmicro Officescan, but none of them found anything (all 3 are 100% up-to-date).
So I ran a repair of IE as per
http://www.theeldergeek.com/repair_ie6.htm, but still no luck. I would like to run Windowsupdate also, but this too is failing (and the "manual update" requires that you start IE, so catch 22).
I haven't noticed any adware, spyware etc. etc. over the last few weeks and this machine is kept quite clean (used for demonstrating that web app to clients) and I usually only connect it to any sort of network to run updates.
Somewhere in all this I've noticed the process " wowexec.exe" running. Not sure if this is the real WOW or not. The processname had the leading space, so I think it might be a spoof, however I don't see any of the other symptoms typically described for that (for starters, I've only seen this process running once today and I've looked at task manager at least 20 times) and neither Spybot or Hijackthis picked up anything.
BTW, this machine is on Windows XP Pro, SP1 (tried loading SP2 a few months ago without success and haven't tried again since...)
Any suggestions?
