I am running XP professional & Office 2002 on a HP Pavilion A 1000y computer, intel celeron chip. The monitor is an HP Flat Screen VS 15c.

My problem is that every time I open explorer it will open another 2 explorer windows. If I try to close any of them, explorer opens another. Can anyone tell me what to do or try ?

Thanks,
Rhonda

Hi Rhonda, and welcome

While I'll admit that I'm not perfect, this sounds like abnormal and erratic behavior to me. Before we explore any technical issues, I'd like to recommend you to one of our Malware Specialists, just to make sure there's nothing nasty inside your computer causing these issues. Once the specialist has a look around, he/she will let you know about the findings. If any issues they find are not related to the issue you are having, then come on back to this topic and I'll be happy to troubleshoot some more.

I suggest you go to the Malware Forum and run all the steps located in the START HERE. These self-help tools will help you clean up 70% of problems on your own. If you are still having problems after doing the steps, then please post a HiJackThis Log in THAT forum. If you are unable to run and/or post a HJT log, then post that in your initial post in the topic you create in that forum.

If you are still having problems after being given a clean bill of health from the malware expert, then please return to THIS thread and we will pursue other options to help you solve your current problem(s).

Thank you for your reply. I just thought I'd let you all know that we ran AVG on the computer last night and it found a lot of stuff that it removed but we still have the same problem this morning. -- Rhonda

I'm glad you got some things taken care of. I'd still recommend submitting your logfile for a Malware Specialist to review, if you haven't done so already. It's not likely that AVG caught everything sadly. I'd like to make sure that you're totally clean.

Since the problem is that I can't open Internet Explorer, it is hard for me to do any thing that requires going to a website and downloading something or running something. Therefore I printed out the information and I downloaded all of the downloadable stuff. I am now going home to try all of it. Since I am at work now but won't be here tomorrow, I will try to log in from home and post the results but it may be Monday (at work) before I can do that if I still can't get in to Internet Explorer. -- Thanks for everything, Rhonda

This behaviour can be caused if you had Internet Explorer 7 on a computer and performed a Windows Repair on it. This would take it back to IE6, but still leave Internet Explorer it was Version 7. Result = mass confusion.

Therefore the best thing to do is download a copy of Internet Explorer 7, burn it onto CD and install on the computer in question. Normally you download it through Windows Update but kind of difficult when it doesn't work anyway...

THANK YOU SO VERY MUCH! My husband was just about to re-format the computer when I read your suggestion. He did what you suggested and it WORKED! He was very happy and wanted me to be sure and thank you.

I had already finished the virus checking that was suggested earlier by facedown98 and nothing was found so we were really beginning to worry.

Thank you again, all of you,
Rhonda