iexplore.exe hangs up shutdown

[thewolfe]

XP machine hangs up on iexplore.exe upon shutdown. Message: "Program not responding."

End up doing a "hard" shutdown.

[Krom]

Internet explorer won't shut down = probably malware ---> format c:

[thewolfe]

Krom, what's your second best answer? That may be ok for me cause I back everything up but this is a 70 year old account's computer who doesn't know diddley about computers and my only contact with his computer is LogMeIn.

Maybe I should have filled you in but.......

[fliptw]

maybe your standard malware removal cycle,of which I'm sure we already gave you a list of in your previous posts, probably by either bubba or krom.

But sometimes, you gotta pull the trigger.

[Krom]

Basically you've got IE running as a background task, and there is pretty much never a good reason for that. You can try running the standard set of anti-malware tools, I'd also uninstall every toolbar and anything else that installs with an IE addon, then forcibly remove and or disable the rest of them since there is probably more than a few garbage addons causing this and other problems.

The problem here is a lot of these IE addons come bundled with other software, so even if you don't use or automatically load the other software, the toolbars and stuff are still active in IE. And to make matters even worse, even if you uninstall the original program that came with the offending bundled software, most uninstallers pretty much never remove the extras (like anything that ever installs the ask.com toolbar for instance).

[thewolfe]

Thanks guys. I did remove a bunch of toolbars yesterday, but they weren't bad guys, they were like Google, AVG and the like.

He runs Malwarebytes about every week and it doesn't pick up anything. I'll try to run some other virus software when I get a chance and see if that comes up with anything.

I' also checked his "processes" yesterday and found at least four iexplore.exe running. I'll check his add-ons and see if I find anything there.

Also, I use Revo uninstaller when the program is available there.

Thanks for the post.

[Isaac]

x2... reformat. Backing up the activity of a 70 year old can't be that bad. it's not like he had 30 game save files in obscure folders. It sounds like he has you doing the fix, so it shouldn't matter what his skill level is.

The vast majority of his important documents are probably on his desktop and "my documents" folder. For backing up his stuff, run a search on all xls, xlsx, doc, docx, and any other file extensions he might be using. He might do accounting on his own computer so look for any files related to those programs, like quickbooks. If he's on anything older than XP you might consider switching him to Ubuntu 10.04 with impoved PPAs. Then customize the theme to look like windows.