ok; a friend of mine happened across an ilegal porn site in IE (Windows Mill. Ed.); it asked him if it was ok to download a program and run int; he clicked "no". Ever since then, his home page is set to the site; changing the registry and resetting all the homepage values does nothing; the home page gets reset to the illegal site upon reboot.
He had a relative of his look at it after i did; he changed the registry (and didn't make a backup), downloaded and installed "tweekme", did a few other things (of which i have forgotten), etc etc. still nothing (unless you count the fact that tweekme broke IE and he had to completely uninstall IE and reinstall it to browse files -- how brain dead is it again to make the browser part of the kernel?????). The site i no longer operational, so IE throws an error when started. When i clicked on something (can't remember what) to show the properties of the link in the location bar, the location changed to something like "res://shdoclc.dll/something/homepage" and said that it couldn't be found. I looked at the file shdoclc.dll, and lo and behold it had a different internal name.... google search on the file returned a slew of sites that said that the file is used by IE to store default pages (thew home page, the "about:blank" page, the search page, etc etc" and gave many examples on how to change those defaults by editing the file....
is it likely that the site executed a vbscript that replaced this file? is this file availible for download?
incedently, he won't let me touch the system again to find out; his wife has thousands of digital pictures (no hardcopies, no backups) and was extreemly irate about the possibility of losing them all when IE broke....
i wish i could get him to switch to linux, but he only uses the pute to browse the internet every morning when he wakes up..... and of course, the whole compatibility with Wife 1.0 thingy.... (i have the same problem).....
anyways;
-t.