IE weirdness

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Hi All,

Had a weird one happen today.

Our bookkeeper uses IE because she goes to so many sites that don't support Firefox, and IE is giving her fits. One specific url that she types into the address bar closes IE, opens My Computer and takes her to an empty folder: C:\My Documents\user_name.domain\www.site.com. However, if she Google's the site name and clicks on the link to the site from Google it opens normally.

No folder exists by this name anywhere on her computer that I can find, and there are no shortcuts by that name either.

Has anyone seen this? I've done some Googling on this and haven't been able to find anything on it.

I have had her clean out all cookies, history, temporary files, and reboot.

 

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Some really strange form of spyware???

 

The sort of thing that usualy does this to IE is a rogue BHO.

HijackThis and other antispyware things will probably show it up.

Don't forget that there is just recently a set of unpatched vulnerabilities in IE which M$ won't patch till the 11th.

Harry.

 

Not to get off the subject, but.......

Firefox IE tab

I got tired of switching between two browsers because some sites don't support FF. Now I just use FF and have thise sites to open in FF with the IE engine. Works great.

 

ffreeloader,

Yes, I've had this oddity occur to me. I narrowed it down to using the IE Address field as if it was a search field. My default webpage is set to http://www.msn.com . Ever since I use the search field in the actual msn.com webpage instead of the IE Address field, things seems to be more stable.

I wish you luck with this odd problem.

 

open the registry and find the key hkcu\software\microsoft\windows\currentversion\explorer\band\address
there should be a dword value called useshellparsing. set it to 0. if the key and/or the value doesn't exist, create it. let us know if it works.

 

I have just subscribed to this thread because I am interested in the outcome

 

d-Faktor,

What is the intended outcome of this registry hack? Will it result in the possible desired behavior?

Thanks to everyone for the replies. I haven't had a chance to run HijackThis on the computer yet, but will be doing it soon. Also found out from the user today that there was a file in a folder on the desktop that had the same url in it. That may be the entire cause of this, but I'll let yo u know what I find.

 

this can be reproduced very easily. the internet explorer address bar also functions as a search engine. say you have a file or folder in your profile (on your desktop for instance) called www.site.com, and you enter that in the address bar, ie will first search your profile, before it searches the internet. when it finds it locally, it will close internet explorer, and open said file or folder. exactly as your original post described. to disable that "feature", you use this hack. so in short, yes.

 

So, d does that reg hack do the same thing as ticking the radio button in advanced Internet options, that says "when searching - do not search from the address bar"?

 

no, the option in internet explorer (do not search from address bar) only affects internet search (which by default is set to msn search). local search will always be done, regardless of how you define this option.

 

erratum: the "search" only seems to include files/folders on the desktop, not the entire profile as i alluded to earlier.