Google search malfunction

[thebigdishman]

Hi all

I have just finished cleaning up my daughter's computer (in France) - only 21 viruses, trojans and spyware items. Trend Micro now safely loaded and working correctly.

OS XP Home 2002 SP2. Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird installed.

I am left with what appears to be one problem with two different manifestations.

From Windows Explorer I cannot use a direct shortcut link to any website using IE except to the defined home page - http://www.neuf.fr/redirect/rdn.asp?...e=99999&page=1 which defaults to Neuf Cegetel, neufportail.fr

Ironically the AOL search on that page, powered by Google, works correctly.

The message I get is: "No associated program ... Create an association via Control Panel ..."

In Firefox I can't access Google UK or COM. If I key google.co.uk or .com into the address bar I get a message: "You have chosen to open ... which is an application/octet-stream from Google - What should Firefox do with this file?"

If I key http://www.uk.google.com/ I get sent to Google France, the URL in the address bar becomes Google and at the top of the screen I get the "Page not found" message and Trend Micro identifies a dangerous website http://195.225.177.18/cgi-bin as dangerous spyware.

I get a similar problem if I get to Google via AOL. Then I try to click the SEARCH button. There the message I get is again "application/octet-stream from Google - What should Firefox do with this file?"

Any ideas - help please.

[wige]

I would completely uninstall Firefox for the moment. Go to the Microsoft web site, and download Windows Defender, which is an anti-spyware product, not the best, but it includes a reset feature that should allow you to reset or correct the registry entries for IE fairly easily.

Once you have IE back up and working, I would suggest downloading the beta Firefox 3. Because this is a different version of the browser, it should overwrite the damaged registry entry and config files that were causing the problem, and you should be able to start over from scratch.

[thebigdishman]

Thank you. I wasn't certain about Windows Defender but had it downloaded as one of my options. I'll let you know how I get on.

[thebigdishman]

Defender cannot download current definitions, and I can't find the reset feature. Maybe I am just being very dense.