crackpot

Windows 98, IE 5.5.

So, I happened to visit a rather unsavory site. Pop-unders left and right, the stubborn ones that won't close easily, or when they do close, spawn two more, etc.
Anyway, once that hell was over, I realized that I can no longer get images/pics/logos of any kind. Only red x's, all over the place. Damn! <i>I can, however, right-click/show picture. That works.</i>
I've tried Tools/Internet Options/Advanced/Multimedia/Show pictures; that was fine.
I deleted all cookies, internet temp files, and history, just in case.
Scanned with Ad-Aware. Okay.
Ran AVG 6.0 Anti-Virus.
Also scanned at http://housecall.trendmicro.com/ . Actually found a little something, and deleted it/rebooted. No change.

<b>edit:</b> Also, Ad-Free was running at the time, and now seems fried. Message reads: "Error appending to your existing HOSTS file: Path/File access error Exiting Ad-Free". Dunno if that helps anything.

So, I'm a moron. Does anyone have an idea as to what I oughta try next? I could really use a hand...

BoCo

You need ZoneAlarm Pro, for starters. I haven't had a pop-up ad while running it for months. It's $50 and worth every penny just for that alone, not to mention it's great firewall protection.

Maybe you vould try re-installing IE, or upgrading to IE 6.0?

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Sunrise

Kerio PF is a much better firewall - and is free for personal use.
MyIE2 uses IE to render pages, supports tabbed browsing and popup filtering. It's considered the best along with google toolbar for filtering popups, etc. There's also other browsers such as mozilla that you can try which has popup filtering.
There's 2 different products that are superior and are free.

In regards to your problem, I'm not sure what to do about the image problem, very odd problem. Upgrade IE i guess? With adaware not working, sounds like something is modifying your host file? Maybe a trojan or something? Open ur host file - i'm not sure where exactly in win98 it is, or if win98 even has one, but I'll presume it does, in win2k/xp it's under windows\system32\drivers\etc and in a file called hosts.
Open it up and see if there's anything odd there - usually there's just a line for localhost to be 127.0.0.1. If there's some other lines there that you don't think should be there, maybe trojan or virus or something? Some do that to prevent antivirus software upgrades.

soccerchamp76

I would upgrade IE first, and maybe splurge and upgrade to XP; which will solve all of your problems.

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crackpot

Firstly, thanks for responding, you three!
I do have Pop-Up Stopper (the free one) going, which is fine for pop-ups, but only so-so with the pop-unders. So, yeah, there's one thing for me to consider.
Re-installing IE, or upgrading it: Sounds like a good idea, but I was hoping the solution would be a little less severe, you know? I guess if nothing else comes up, I'll exercise one of those options.
And yeah, the Ad<i>Free</i> was being awfully strange, so I just deleted it entirely. No improvement though; still no images.

soccerchamp76

What kind of system do you have?

__________________
Brian Griffin: Ah, if my memory serves me, this is the physics department.
Chris Griffin: That would explain all the gravity.

guthmund

Okay, here's what I got....

It's good that you got rid of Ad-free. Chances are if a program wigs out and things start getting funky said program is responsible for funkiness. (I hope that made sense... )

I would say that it is important to get rid of the whole enchilada and am going to assume that you followed its uninstall program to get rid of it. I know sometimes they're tricky to get rid of and sometimes stuff hangs around. I ran a couple of searches through Google and didn't find anybody with any uninstall problems with Ad-free so take that for what it's worth.

If you want to mess with it. Your HOSTS file is located at C:\windows and might be hidden. It seems that Ad-Free uses a HOSTS file to block unsavory pop ups, banner ads, and unwanted pop-unders, so you'll probably see some strange stuff in there when you find it. I would probably just rename it something generic and then see if that fixes the problem.

I also ran across a couple of mentions about firewalls and anti-virus stuff. Seems that some firewalls and anti-virus software (if it's loading from startup, which AVG has the option to do...) have a problem with not letting images load until you right-click them. Maybe your version was corrupted in the ad-blitz or during a routing upgrade. Although most of the popular firewalls and anti-virus software was mentioned, Norton seems to be the biggest offender. You didn't mention running a firewall, but I figured I'd throw that in.
So, you might turn all that junk off and see if that fixes it.

If none of that works here's a link to the Microsoft Knowledge Base. http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=283807

It mentions an encoding problem and a registry edit, so buyer beware

If all else fails...I would just upgrade IE. MyIE is a great program, I've been running it for months and can't remember the last pop-up I had.

I know that was long winded, but I hope something there helps to fix the problem or, at the very least, leads you to the right solution.

good luck and let us know how it turns out

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soopafreek

i don't have any experience with ad-free, but if you're running spybot, check to make sure that it didn't lock the hosts file. that might be the cause of the hosts file error you're receiving.

also, i had a friend who had the same problem with IE's rexing. the solution was to reinstall (upgrade) IE...

just my two cents. i hope it helps.

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aaarrrrrgggghhhh!!!!

crackpot

So, I still haven't been able to correct the problem of imageless browsing. But I've yet to reinstall or upgrade IE, so there you go.

Now, along the way, I noticed some weird things running, via ctrl+alt+dlt, etc. and it seems I had this regedit -s C:\WINDOWS\sp.dll thingamajig; googled and found a heap of info on that (it's bad, essentially). Picked up spybot, ran that a few times.
Strange thing with the spybot: my homepage has not been tampered with for prolly over a year, and yet immediately after running spybot (to find and kill stuff just like that), my homepage was altered, I think it was "topsearch" or something like that. Strange, no?

Anyway, I'll keep messing with it all. Just wanted to thank you all for your time and help. I really appreciate it!

clues_blues

i would definitely think about renaming your hosts file to hosts.old. then copy it to a new file named hosts.txt. edit hosts.txt so that the only line after the comment lines (the ones beginning with #) reads localhost 127.0.0.1

then save the file and rename it hosts with no extension (such as txt etc.)

alternatively you could download a host file from this guy

http://everythingisnt.com/hosts.html

but since his intention is to block ads you may not want to do that...

good luck

c_b

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crackpot

<b>Update:</b>
So what I did was, I downloaded a new browser (SlimBrowser), just as a backup, in case my re-installing IE screwed up somehow.
I was playing with the new browser, all lah-di-dah-di-dah, thinking "Hey, this is pretty nice!", which lead to thinkin' "Why don't I try <i>another</i> browser?".
So I picked up Mozilla Firebird too. Guess what? Pretty cool.
I'm now seeing why people go crowing about their browsers and, uh, putting down Explorer. To put it politely. I don't even care to fix IE anymore; I am content to try and decide which of these two I'll settle on.

It seems a little like buying a new rug to save having to clean the wine stain off the old one, but I really, really like the new rugs better, y'know?

Thanks again for all of your help. I appreciate it.

Redlemon

Woo-hoo, we got another one!!

There's a good number of Firebird fans on TFP, so feel free to ask questions here. Or, their forums are excellent as well. Firebird is great if you like to tweak the innards and get it running EXACTLY the way you want.