...Little Firefox help?

[Drascin]

Well, I'm not usually one to ask for computer advice, but this time I gotta admit I'm pretty intrigued due to the strange behaviour of the error.

You see, I (like every civilized netsurfer out there :smallwink:) use Firefox, and have been rather content with it. It works like a charm, mostly.

But today, he's decided to start doing some rather strange stuff. Namely, some pages just don't work. Not all, mind - GitP or TVTropes work just fine, but there are a lot of forums I can't access, and, more importantly, I can't Google anything. Whenever I try to enter some of those pages, or click "search" in the search engines (also tried Yahoo, no dice), it just stays "loading" forever and ever.

Well, that's strange, I thought. I cleared caché and cookies, restarted, and tried again - maybe it just was acting a bit odd and rebooting would help. Yyyyeah, no :smallsigh:.

"Some corrupted files, maybe? I'll try reinstalling... I suppose this is as good a time as any to upgrade to Firefox 3." So I did (good thing I know the Mozilla page from memory). Again, no dice.

"Okay, this doesn't seem to be from Firefox - maybe those idiots at my ISP messed the DNS services again. Let's try another web browser...". So, repressing a wince, I fired up IE in this same computer, and then went to my Wii and opened its Opera-based browser (in case the problem was at the computer and not the browsers or the ISP), and proceeded to try a couple of the pages that wouldn't work on Firefox.

And they work perfectly on both - they even load pretty fast, as if to spite me. So I'm given to assume the error has to be due to Firefox. But I'm pretty stumped as to what could be causing it - mainly, the fact that some pages load and some not, and even in the ones that do load, stuff just doesn't work (like Google), without an unifying theme or anything. I even got so crazy so as to seriously consider whether it had developed a serious search engine allergy, but that's not it either, because GameFAQs' search feature works just peachy :smalltongue:. 'tis rather strange indeed :smallconfused:.

So, any ideas of just what's happening? I'd like to be able to avoid IE for my Google-searching, myself...

[Player_Zero]

What other programs are you running? Are you running some sort o' virus protection dealie?

...Also, you haven't seemed to have tried google-ing it yet... I realise that you'd have to use IE to do so, but Google-ing things is the best way of solving any and every problem.

Preliminary google-searching tells me it might be a wireless router issue.

[Drascin]

What other programs are you running? Are you running some sort o' virus protection dealie?

Thought about that too. They've never interfered, but tried deactivating both Spybot and Avast (the two antivirus I use) anyway, just in case. And again, nuts to me.

Other programs... nothing active. I don't really know what a lot of the processes I'm running in the background do, so might be something from there. Though I'd wonder where it came from so suddenly, since this morning Google worked just fine and suddenly it didn't.


...Also, you haven't seemed to have tried google-ing it yet... I realise that you'd have to use IE to do so, but Google-ing things is the best way of solving any and every problem.

Yeah, I guess I'll try. I'm just slightly instinctively renuent to use IE for long periods of time. Though I'm not really sure what to Google for. "Pages on Firefox don't load?" :smalltongue:. Well, worth a shot!

Update - Searching shows that there are a myriad possible causes, but after trying about a dozen other things, the Virtumonde malware seems to fit my description best, and Spybot fund and supposedly terminated it yesterday night in my system, actually, so maybe the elimination didn't go well. It's supposed to infect the explorer.exe process, so, me and my particular lack of subtlety just terminated it to see what happened.

Whaddaya know, it worked. I can search google as long as I don't have the explorer process on. Of course, this is heavily annoying, but it's something. Now to find a cure for this Virtumonde ****er. Anyone know any good forums to ask for stuff like that?

[Trog]

Are you running any Add-ons in Firefox? If so, maybe try disabling them all, resart, and try again? :smallconfused:

I downloaded Firefox 3 the other day and it works like a charm... except a theme that I was using no longer works. Other than that it works great.

[Player_Zero]

Whaddaya know, it worked. I can search google as long as I don't have the explorer process on. Of course, this is heavily annoying, but it's something. Now to find a cure for this Virtumonde ****er. Anyone know any good forums to ask for stuff like that?

Google is our almighty deity.

[Drascin]

Are you running any Add-ons in Firefox? If so, maybe try disabling them all, resart, and try again? :smallconfused:

I downloaded Firefox 3 the other day and it works like a charm... except a theme that I was using no longer works. Other than that it works great.

Nah, I barely use four addons and I did deactivate them. As said, I'm heavily suspecting malware.

But yeah, Firefox 3, from what I've been able to use after the disabling of explorer, looks pretty cool. My theme doesn't work either, though. Pity, I liked all the silvery motif :smallsmile:. When all this's done, I'll have to go to Mozilla and get a new one.


Google is our almighty deity.

Wikipedia has proven the better demigod in this issue, actually, redirecting me to a wiki about this stuff, and from there to half a dozen forums. I've posted in a few, now to wait someone to notice me :smallbiggrin:.

[bluewind95]

There's a program called HijackThis. If you know the name of the files and such of that malware, that should prove to be extremely helpful in removing it.

[valadil]

What happens when firefox doesn't load a page? Do you get a 404 page or does firefox just keep loading indefinitely?

Have you tried another profile? I'm not sure off the top of my head how to create a new firefox profile under windows, but if you log in as another user entirely you should be able to use a clean copy of firefox. If that does work, then you know something in your profile is causing the problem.

[Khanderas]

Google is our almighty deity.
And Firefox is it's prophet.

[Mustiado]

I'd recommend looking up a free Anti-virus program called Avira Antivir Personal virus Protection. It gets a lot of viruses and malware that other services miss because its less well-known, and it updates every day. Throw in the fact that it's free, and it's hard to argue with the value. ?:)

Edit: It's also possible that while removing the malware, the spyware service you were using did an incomplete job and left it half-working, half out of commission. I used to have this problem a lot on an older computer. Removing the files themselves so it couldn't perform, but leaving the root processes so that it still impaired function.

[Aereshaa_the_2nd]

In the beginning, there was binary. And binary begat assembler, and assembler begat FORTRAN.
And FORTRAN begat ALGOL, and ALGOL begat CPL, and CPL begat BCPL, and BCPL begat B, and B begat C, and C begat UNIX.
And UNIX begat TCP/IP, and TCP/IP begat GNU, and GNU begat Linux. And Linux was herald to one thousand, nay, one million programs. :smallbiggrin:

Including Firefox.