Ok every now and then my IE goes weird (so far 3 times in 4 weeks)... no pages will be displayed and then my homepage gets redirected to 81x.. I have CWS shredder (comes up clean) , adaware (comes up clean) , spybot (comes up clean) and I have spywareblaster ..all are up to date and ive done a hijack this log which I can spot nothing out the ordinary except one registry value: O4 - HKLM\..\Run: [BrowserBrand] C:\Program Files\ONLINE~1\XTRA\brand.exe Now ive searched for this file and it is not present (already checked to see if it was a hidden file) Is it ok if I use hijackthis to get rid of that registry value?

If I am reading correctly, that entry is in your RUN hive in LOCAL_MACHINE or CURRENT_USER; if you have followed the path in the entry in Explore and found nothing, I suggest that you copy the entry exactly on a piece of paper (in case you must reenter it) and delete the file. I am sure you would recognize a legit. program that starts up.

done.. still have the problem.. although today was different in that I was getting re-directed to german sites and some site wouldnt load.. I have also noticed that IE is very slow now at loading pages..the problem continues