Q. My problem is that a porn page keeps popping up as my home page to replace the Windows Internet Explorer default page. It is some kind of page from Germany, I think. Every day when I boot up, I need to go Tools/Options and change the home page.
I have done the Start and Run and msconfig. However, I cannot find anything to help. What would be my next step? I am always afraid to delete things, as I am not sure what purpose they serve.
This seems to come up after I have used Juno.
A. You are victim of an alarmingly large number of what are called “browser hijack” moles. These moles get loaded when the perpetrator tricks a user into clicking an icon that runs a bit of Web page code that writes changes to the Windows registry to make some undesired Web site the default home page.
This is very nasty stuff sometimes. Other times it’s easy to fix.
The most common hijack trick is to get the victim to install a file with the extension .hta (hypertext application) or .js (Java script) on the hard drive. These files change the registry run key in Windows to order the unwanted Web page as the default at each startup. If you clean things up, reset the home page and reboot, the hijack happens again.
The safest way to approach this is to find all of the .js and .hta files that may be on your machine and rename them so they won’t execute. Rename them instead of delete them in case you wind up eliminating the wrong file, and it’s something you need to restore.
Click on Start and Search and then type in *.hta to begin. Change the extension on each file to something unique like .hxx. Repeat for .js files and make them .jsx.
If this fails, perhaps you can get help from the Ad-aware pop-up-killer software that also includes anti-hijack routines. The Ad-aware Standard Edition software is available without charge at www.lavasoft.com. (12/27/03)
Q. Not long ago, my computer lost the ability to use the Web browser’s picture download command to save images in the correct format. Instead, no matter whether the image has a .jpeg or a .tiff or a .gif extension, my computer insists on saving it as a Windows .bmp format file named “untitled.bmp.”
It used to be that I could just open a Web site and right-click on an image, and Windows would let me save the file wherever I wanted in its proper format.
A. This vexing malfunction can absolutely ruin Web surfing for people whose hobbies or professions require using the Web browser to make copies of the wealth of images posted across the Internet.
As best I can determine, nobody knows why this happens, but the problem is fairly common, and there is a way to fix it without knowing exactly what it is you are fixing. Web heads have figured out that browsers get stripped of the ability to download anything but Windows .bmp images when programs using the ActiveX and Java programming procedures get damaged somehow.
The fix requires deleting all of the programs you have downloaded over past years or months from Web sites that use these small bits of code to handle display features. When you do this, it will require you to put up with reloading a lot of those downloaded programs when your return to their sites. But it’s worth the bother because of how badly this glitch can cripple Web use.
The easiest way to find the Downloaded Program File folder is to use that name as a search term by clicking on Start and then Search and Find Files and Folders. When the Downloaded Program File folder comes up in the Search window, open it and delete everything inside.
To make sure the problem isn’t restored without warning, you also should delete all temporary Internet files. To do that, click on Tools and Internet Options in Microsoft Internet Explorer and look on the menu that pops up for the General tab. There you will find a listing for Temporary Internet files and a Delete Files button.
Do this and your browser will resume correctly assigning file types to those files when you give them a right-click. (5-24-04)
