Quirky problems with WinXP Home Edition SP3

[vhende2000]

I have an x86 pc with WinXP Home Edition and IE 8.  This is a retail store bought pc that was preloaded and I have no original WinXP Home disks nor do I have any OEM disks that came with the machine. 

 

I have a new problem that just cropped up out of the blue that Microsoft Support can't seem to do anything about (or won't without $$$).

I have a problem with IE8 on WinXP in that all my settings suddenly seem all screwed up. 

Everything was running reasonably OK one night and not the next.

 

I have run all my antimalware (MBAM, MBAR, HitManPro) and antivirus and antiadware (MSE and SAS, etc) and nothing shows up.

IE8 wants to run predominately in compatibility mode.  I have changed settings and then reset IE8 to the default settings but this had no effect whatsoever.  I have not tried to reinstall IE8 as yet.

 

I can not edit posts in Microsoft Community forums because the screen freezes whenever I hit the edit button even though I can edit my profile just fine. My Yahoo mail is all screwed up. etc, etc.
 

All this happened suddenly just two days ago. Previously everything was running just fine.
 

I am also having problems reinstalling Family Tree Maker 2005 after an uninstall because of an "access denied" error.

 

So I don't know whether I have an undetected virus or trojan problem or whether my system files are just all screwed up.

 

I also don't know whether a repair install of XP is even possible on this setup or how to do that.

 

Any bright ideas would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks

Vernon

 

 

 

 

[Firefox]

Lets try and reset the browsers first...

Please try the following and let us know if it corrects the issue or not.

Please visit each of the following sites and lets reset all of your browsers back to defaults to prevent unexpected issues.

If you are not using one of the browsers but it is installed then you may want to consider uninstalling it as older versions of some software can pose an increase in the potential for an infection to get in.

Internet Explorer

How to reset Internet Explorer settings

Firefox

Click on Help / Troubleshooting Information then click on the Reset Firefox button.

Chrome

Chrome - Reset browser settings

Opera

How to Perform a (really) clean Reinstall of Opera