Internet explorer randomly closes andwon't reopen

[lhuser]

The thread title pretty much says it all.

I have a guy here who's IE closes down randomly and does not reopen. He could browse for 5 minutes, to even a good half-hour, even sometimes it won't even do it.When it happens though, it just closes; no error messages, no nothing. When that happens, he will need to restart his PC, because it will never reopen.

I came to his place to check, andhe actually happened tohave malware, so I cleaned it, did the most updates, and upgrade him to IE8, as he had 7.0 before. The problem went away for a while, but it came back again. I'm at loss. What could be the culprit of this problem?

 

[Captain Pooka]

Do other browsers do the same thing? I would try disabling the AV for a bit and see if it happens again... though that's probably not it.
I would think if there's any software issues they would be known to M$ or the sofware developer. Did you run malwarebytes (or wahtever you ran) in safe mode? When I run stuff and catch a lot, then do it again in safe mode I always find more.

Is he running Windows 7? Try disabling it and reinstalling it or something... I'm sure you've tried all of this W7's kind of trickey with IE though...

When did it start happening to him? Or is he one of those "I don't remember" guys... That would be bad!

 

[lhuser]

Nah, he's not the type to forget. It started to happen around a good 2 months now. He's running Windows XP and his AV is Avast Home. Now, I know that AV slows PCs like a living heck, but he likes it.

Anyways, the most biggest brain-fart ever for me is asking him to try another browser. I thought about it all day, but I'll give him a shout and I'll explain it.

As for spyware removal, I ran Spybot, and if I remember, I might have used Combofix as well.