help for my mother-in-law (future)

[myincubliss]

on my mother-in-law-of-the-future's computer, something is amiss but none of us can work out how to make it work again. It refuses to let anyone in the house sign in to MSN applications (explorer, messenger, hotmail etc). No amount of checking for viruses, adware etc has helped. We read that reinstalling xp rids you of the problem for 2-3 weeks, but we can't find the disc anywhere. I believe this problem happened once before, but this time system restore will not let us go back far enough to resolve the problem.
Thanks, if you sort this out, the old dear will be forever in your debt :)
(in her defence, she's only young (and unugly) - although it is her birthday tomorrow, so she's getting older as we speak!)

[ldyguique]

I did a websearch --

First, I would probably delete cookies in Internet Options and then try this (and report back if it works):

Click Start - Run
Type : control userpasswords2
press Enter

Here you can delete or change ALL passwords.

Click the Advanced Tab and there click the Manage passwords button.
Ther you will see your .Net and Passport entries, delete or modify as you wish.

hope it helped,

[myincubliss]

we tried this a few times, but it still claims that either our username doesn't exist or that the password is incorrect or both.
Any other ideas?
thanks

[myincubliss]

we also tried all three options presented to us when the whole process failed:
register your email address
reset your password
sign in and confirm that your .NET password is still valid

all of which lead to the page which says 'the page you have requested is not responding', and no amount of pressing the refresh button would make it come up any different, as well as trying with a variety of different email addresses
(if that helps)

[greeneagle]

Some malicious software and adware, including Virtumundo also infest the restore files!

Ken

[VirtualNerds]

Open the Search function under the Start button, and search for "hosts*". You should find one or more Host.txt files. Open these files in NOTEPAD, and delete the list of URLs in them. Save and close the file. Do not delete the files, only the contents!

Some Spywares create or modify these files to block access to certain URLs.

This thing prevented me from running any kind of search on Google, Yahoo, MSN, or any other engine. If I could actiually get to the engine's home page, I could not search. Google's page was always 404. I could only search places like Dogpile.com, and it made me crazy until I mentioned it to a network admin buddy who had experienced the same thing. He found the solution by accident.

Good Luck! I hope this earns you some points.

[M0rtym0use]

myincubliss,
you could find that the stored passwords is coorupt to reset this goto control panel -> user accounts.

then goto advanced and manage passwords. This will list all usernames that have been used for servers etc.
Click on all Passport accounts and delete them all then reboot to be on the safe side. then try logging into msn etc again.
This should hopefully resolve your problem

MM

[acornwebworks]

When you say "No amount of checking for viruses, adware etc has helped." does that include Spybot S&D as well as House Call online scan
< http://housecall.trendmicro.com/ >?

It sounds like a problem we had on one of our lab computers, and one of those two (I forget which one) found and cleaned the problem when nothing else did.
(We now run House Call 1-2 times a month in addition to our regular antivirus program.)