I was helping out a friend last night with a computer problem… The computer would not seem to be able to connect to the Internet. After some time I worked out that it was connecting to the Internet fine (with some minor settings changes) but it was Internet Explorer that was playing up. Well, anything that used the InternetExplorer libraries. Given how networked the world has become this is a REAL problem. Internet Explorer 7 beta requires online authentication to verify that your copy of Windows is legit. And this is the problem. If IE is not working you are stuffed.

What I forgot about last night was a couple of un-orthidox solutions… The first would be to Uninstall Internet Explorer… Thanks to some court cases this can be done with Add/Remove Windows Components, under Add/Remove Windows Components… Once removed it could then be added, providied the spyware did not detect this trick.

The other option would be to edit the HOSTS file… This is a local copy of the DNS system, and is designed to bootstrap things if DNS is not working, or for local machines. The file is located in the c:windowssystem32driversetc directory.

This file contains the IP addresses and sites, and normally gets processed before the DNS. So where the DNS part of Internet Exploder has been damaged to redirect redirect you to websites the spyware wanted to send you.

Editing the hosts file is easy… The first thing you need to do is do some research… This involves getting the IP addresses for some important hosts so that Windows can then repair itself…

C:Documents and SettingsDarryl Smith>nslookup windowsupdate.microsoft.com
Server: server
Address: 192.168.20.2

Name: windowsupdate.microsoft.nsatc.net
Address: 207.46.225.221
Aliases: windowsupdate.microsoft.com

So you can then edit the HOSTS file with Notepad or wordpad with another line like

207.46.225.221 windowsupdate.microsoft.com
58.6.37.173 radio-active.net.au

With this file, when the IE install cannot find a page, like when it tries to make sure that it is genuine, just find out the name it is looking for, and add the IP address with the name to the HOSTS table.