Yesturday, my brother found out that google.com, yahoo.com, and other search engines wouldn't load anymore. Every other site seems to load fine, so I'm assuming it's virus related. Upon going to any of these sites, it says page cannot be displayed/server not found. The weirdest part is that if I goto images.google.com it will load the image search, but it won't allow a search still. Neither browser will load these pages (Netscape or IE) Any help is much appreciated. And BTW, I'm running a housecall scan just now. Also, yesturday, in a possibly related event, my brother was just playing some games, then he rebooted, on reboot, he tried IE and it was gone, I had to use goback to roll the system back to allow IE to come back. After that I ran an updated Norton, but found nothing that could be causing these problems.

Well, ran hijackthis and found out that something had created a host file that blocked all of those sites. Got it fixed now (deleted the entries from C:\windows\hosts file), thanks for looking though and I hope this helps someone else.

Hi If there was unwanted stuff in hosts file preventing you using IE or netscape...I'm willing to bet you have other spyware/crapware still on your system and the problem will only return shortly... I suggest you download spybot search and destroy and also ad-aware. Both are free programs and will clean out most of whatever screwed up IE and netscape in the first place. You can get them from here http://www.spywareinfo.com/articles/hijacked/ Be sure to update them both b4 running scans. There is also other links and info there to help protect yourself. good luck

hello you may have had your search and or home page hijacked. d/l spybot search and destroy,update it,run it.should get rid of most of the hijackers.

Hmm, had the same problem. Try clicking your homepage button. If it goes to a global search webpage, think you have been hit by the global search hijacker. Also if you got a virus scanner, it will show that it has found that these 2 files to be alter by a trojan (mine does, running Norton) msinfo.exe btconf.exe Go and download cwshredder and run it. It will basically erase the spyware and clean the registry up as well. Try searching in this forum for the global hijack thread. If not mistaken, it's is 8234.

I have the same problem. Google.com will not display nor will lycos.com, yahoo.com is displayed but i cannot use the search engine. I used the SpyBot and Ad-Aware and neither have solved my problem. Is there another option I could consider?