Google "Web" Search not working in IE8 or FF...

[dude_56013]

Guys, if ANY one has any ideas, through them out. I'm trying to get a girl's laptop fixed before she heads off to college. I'm doing it for free because she goes to my church. She had a virus, I got it off. Ran multiple scans afterward and nothing is showing up (MBAM, Avast, ran CCleaner, going to run spybot and adaware over night). The problem is, everything seems to be working fine, but Google will NOT work. I cannot get the Web search to work (that includes the tool bar). First, all that was on the computer was IE7. I updated to IE8 to see if that would fix it. Nope. Installed FF. Nope. When you type something in the search bar, nothing happens. It goes to a white page and says "done" at the bottom. I tried allowing it in internet settings. I tried turning firewall off. I tried allowing all cookies. Problem is, I have no idea if it was working before I removed the virus because I didn't hook up to the net to see (for fear of spreading it). I'm out of ideas guys.

Oh, btw. It runs fine in a proxy server. Which is very odd. It's gotta be machine specific most likely. All other machines on my network work just fine. And here's the kicker. It's only Google and it's only the Web search. Image search works just fine. Bah. I also checked the browser helper objects. Nothing out of place. I'm usually real good with this stuff, but I'm all out of options.

 

[Neodude1123201]

Reinstall Windows.

It'll save you time in the long run.

 

[tom-knox]

Can you ping google?
Have you checked the host file?

 

[dude_56013]

Host file?

I'll try pinging in just a bit. Like I said, that's the ONLY thing I have found to be not working. But, I'm not sure how I'll ping it. I can get to google just fine, it's when I type something in the search bar and hit search that it does the blank page thing. I uninstalled all toolbars and all that. I just find it odd that FF doesn't work either. Hmm...I'm stumped.

EDIT:

OMFG. You, sir, are a F-ING GENIUS. GENIUS! I had NO clue what the hosts file was. As soon as I googled it and found it, there were 20 google entries. Soon as they were deleted, it was up and running. Thank you so much. This will help me in the future as well!

 

[tom-knox]

You're welcome, i've used it a couple times to access servers without domains, via browsers, but there are plenty adwares looking to use it for other things, give away here was that only part of google's functionality was missing.

 

[dude_56013]

You're welcome, i've used it a couple times to access servers without domains, via browsers, but there are plenty adwares looking to use it for other things, give away here was that only part of google's functionality was missing.

Exactly...I just had no clue where to look for a solution. I'd never had to alter/fix the host file before! I knew it wasn't a "live" virus on the computer still because of all the scans I did (Avast boot scan, MBAM, Spybot, Ad-aware, and ran CCleaner hahaha...that's a lot!). So I knew it had to be something that the virus altered before it was removed...just couldn't figure out what. It was frustrating because I thought that it was something that could be solved by a browser reinstall...unfortunately (well, for learning sake, fortunately) that was not the case. Thanks again Tom.