Tuesday, November 6, 2007

Strange Problems

You win some, you lose some. Just yesterday, I dealt with a computer issue: a flash drive was not letting its user save to it. But once I talked with the user, I recognized the problem: that particular mode (which someone in that department has owned) had a little switch to write-protect the files. I just had her find the switch and all was fine.

Today, however, I got a strange one: someone couldn't use Internet Explorer on our network. I poked around a discovered that it was set up to use a Proxy serverm "itgproxy." OK -- normally not a problem. You just change the setting. But the setting kept resetting itself. You'd turn it of, and check a second later and it was back again.

A Google search showed where it might have come from (a mistake by Microsoft), but no one mentioned that it would come back, and the talk about it referenced IE6, not IE7. So I'm stuck.

It certainly behaves like spyware -- you can't get rid of it -- but I can't find why it reinstalls. Deleting BHOs doesn't help. Also, it's specific to a user's profile, not to the computer.

So it's research time. Sigh. Always fun.