Weird Internet Explorer problem

Tannin

Storage? I am Storage!
Joined
Jan 15, 2002
Messages
4,448
Location
Huon Valley, Tasmania
Website
www.redhill.net.au
A really weird thing, ths one. Customer rang me, can't acces the web. She had been onto Telstra Big Pond (that well-known lowest common demoninator of Australian ISPs) and they said everything was perfect. But she can't access any of the three most important URLs she needs to run her business. All she can get is the telstra home page. I try the URLs from my machine, on Mozilla. They work fine.

OK, I said, can you run email? No problem. Can you go to cocacola.com? "It takes me to yahoo."

Bleeahga.

She must be using Explorer. I ask what web browser are you using?
"Big Pond."

No, Big Pond is an Internet service provider, what ... look, don't worry about it, bring me the computer and I'll sort it out.

She turned up 15 minutes later. Plugged her machine into out network, started up Mozilla, loaded the URLs no worries. Tried them in IE. No dice. IE rewrites the address in the address bar to bigpond.com. Every time. Tried different addresses, cocacoala.com redhill.net.au and so on. They all work fine. It is only those three addresses. But they work fine from other browsers on her machine (Moz, Opera, didn't try Firefox but it would have worked), work fine from my machine, it's only IE on her machine.

Scanned for spyware. A bit, not too bad. Nothing really nasty looking. Cleaned it out anyway. Removed all sorts of crap from her startup (nothing too ugly there, just the usual junk). Removed a Telstra ADSL sign-up file. No difference. Set all the IE options back to the factory defaults. Still the same. REGEDITed every single reference to Big Pond out of her registry (except her email address).

Still the same.

Didn't have time to do anything else, but it's a really weird problem. She was itching to go home and get her work done (didn't care which browser she used for it, so long as Mozilla was working on those sites, didn't care what stupid problems IE had - she's got work to do). I had to do other jobs too, so she took the machine away and I'll probably never get to the bottom of it.

But is this a weird problem or is this a weird problem?

Listen guys, now I really DO blame Big Pond for my sister's acne!
 

time

Storage? I am Storage!
Joined
Jan 18, 2002
Messages
4,932
Location
Brisbane, Oz
Did you clear the IE cache?

It's all I can think of, apart from some sort of exotic adware.
 
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