Unable to run IE, FF, and Chrome browsers...

My wife's computer has an issue that just started a week ago that's driving me nuts. The PC has been running Windows 7 Home Edition (64 bit) for over a year. She sat down to use her computer and tried to open IE (IE9). When she clicked on it, a window popped up that says "Internet explorer has stopped working". What's more troublesome is that NONE of the browsers on her PC worked (FF, Chrome, IE). They all give similar error messages and refuse to start.


A friend of mine tried all of the following with no luck (the PC rebooted after each of these tasks):


Removed Chrome and FF. No change.
ran Avast
ran Malwareybytes
ran Adaware
ran Microsoft Security Essentials
ran Miscrosof Saftey Scanner and it came up clean.
ran the Malicious Software tool
ran Ace Utilities
ran CCleaner
ran Spybot
ran tdsskiller
Ran scf /scannnow
Started IE with no add-ons.


Only Malwarebytes picked up anything (only 6 items were found, and all were deleted).


Uninstalled Java and Flash and re-installed. No change.
Uninstalled IE and re-installed. No change.


Ran Windows7 repair disk. Nothing detected.
Reset IE to its defaults. No change.


The kicker is that after all of this, I decided to install Opera and Safari and they work!! But the other three browsers still won't work!!!


Also, if I boot into Safe Mode, all browsers work (IE, FF, Chrome).


Any help would be MUCH appreciated. No changes were made to her computer prior to this happening. I really want to avoid re-installing Windows 7.


thanks,


Andy

With WIN7 you can do an inplace reinstall that only overwrites the OS and leaves programs and data in place, as always do a full drive backup to protect your data before doing this just in case.
Boot to windows put in the win7 DVD and reinstall.

I will give that a go this weekend (after I've backed up the drive) and post the results here. If that don't do it, I don't know what will.

Andy

You should not have 2 antivirus programs installed together. You have Microsoft Security Essentials and Avast installed. This can give you a BSOD and\or cause many problems including yours. Uninstall one of them and try again.

Also, make sure whatever AV you are using, that it is updated to it's latest virus definitions. Only then do a complete scan.

Tell us how it went.

I only had two AV programs because I had Avast to start with (it's the one I always use), but had installed Microsoft's AV as an additional check. That one has been removed now).


Well, here's my problem now. I tried doing the reinstall, but after it went through a few steps and downloaded the latest updates, it came back with a window that said:

The following issues are preventing Windows from upgrading. Cancel the upgrade, complete each task, and then restart the upgrade to continue:

Your current version of Windows is more current than the version you are trying to upgrade to. Windows cannot complete the upgrade.

I'm guessing that the disc I'm using has Windows 7, but her PC is running Win7 with Service Pack 1. Is there anyway to get around this? I'll poke around the Internet, but if anyone has a workaround for, let me know.

thanks,

Andy

If it all works in safe mode, it's simple to fix by finding out what starts with Windows that is preventing the browsers to run... but if you already started re-installing Windows, we can skip this.

Just found out that I have to remove SP1 to do this (since it appears the disk is just Win7 with no service pack). So, I'll give this a go next weekend when my wife is out of town and post the results here.

If you installed SP1 yourself, you can uninstall it. However, if your computer came with SP1 already installed, it can't be uninstalled.

You can get win 7 with SP1 from here. It is the official MS download site.

Download Windows 7 Integrated With SP1 ISO – Official Direct Download Links

This thing is still kicking my butt. I uninstalled SP1, rebooted, and although the SP1 entry was gone from the list of installed updates, when I right-click Computer and choose Properties, it still shows it running SP1.

I did some Googling and some people said to try installing, then uninstalling SP1 again. So, I went to Microsofts website and downloaded SP1 (making sure it was the service pack specifically for Windows 7 64-bit, and not any of the ones that included debugging. I definitely had the correct one for this computer).

When I try to install it, I keep getting an error message saying "Error: ERROR_NOT_FOUND(0X80070490"

I found one link saying to look through the CBS log (windows\logs\CBS\CBS.log. I did see a lot of failure messages pointing to only KB976932 and KB976902 (the last one seems to be a mystery update from what I've read, and it can't be removed).

I went back in to confirm KB976932 was not in the list of installed updates, and it was not. I then went into the registry and deleted all entries but one for this update. The one I couldn't delete was:

Package_for_KB976932~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~6.1.1.17514

So, any thoughts on a workaround for this? I REALLY don't want to format the drive and re-install Win7.

thanks,

Andy