Internet Explorer behaving strangly

A friend called me up: help we have a virus.
mmm, I dont think its a virus but I cant find the prob.
Got round, sure enuf IE just come up with an error message and wont function at all but if you logon thru dial up networking the connection is fine, so it seems. and had a look in system/device mngr. There were a whole load of unknown items under network adaptors I think it was.
They have apparently done nothing to PC exept upgrage ti IE5.5. However a quick look at there startup files revealed that they had installed a whole load of freeware etc.
Tried internet explorer repair tool and system file checker with no succsee. I think it may be some kind of irq conflict as well but dont know enuf about this stuff to really diagnose it.
Any help would be appreciated.

WOW!

Can you be a bit more detailed???

What's the relevance of IE not working but does if you logon under dial-up networking. IE is a browser, if you are not connected to an intranet, extranet or the web, it will tell you the start page cannot be displayed - this behaviour is by design. Used to be a 404 fault, expect it still is.

Could it be that one of their freeware/ shareware progs are forcing IE to look for a page?

Have you got a third party IE (Freeserve, AOL etc) that has set a default start-up page (they all do!) using a proxy address (you'll find this under Tools>Internet Options>Connection

BUT if you ain't connected you will get an error.

Good luck!

hi, sorrey, a bit more detail: although we can get the phone line busy by logging on thru dialup networking IE still refuses to function. I will go round there again and this time take some notes. oh and a few other problems with someother programs as well, musicmatch dont work and some other stuff. oh and one of there friends tried reinstalling win98se over the top and just got a load of error messages at the end of the installation. unfortunatly I just broke my collar bone and am not too up for anything at the mo.

"If that computer were a horse, you'd have to take it out back and shoot it"

MAAAAN, sorry to hear about your troubles. I don't recommend a format and reinstall of Windows that often, but this is one of those times. There are so many things that are screwed up in this poor case (especially with the failed reinstall of Win98, who knows how bad that is screwed up), that I don't think you'd ever be able to fix them all manually.

Yeah, I was hoping against having to do that but everyone seems to be saying the same. Thanks for replys people!!