Acer laptop Vista problem - Internet blocked

[chris.p]

Looks like this is either a Vista thing or Acer management crud.

On an Acer laptop, the web is blocked. He uses Internet Exploder (OK, I told him no more, use Ffx or whatever), and it cannot connect. Same with any browser now, no web connection.

First thing apparently was a message on IE, "IE has shut down to protect your computer" or something like that.

An error message came up once: Acer Program Launcher is terminating.
[edit]
And all the widgets on the right sidebar are off, it's all blank there. They won't restore.

All browsers work but cannot connect. He uses a dongle cellphone hookup but I don't suppose that's relevant.

As usual the security is rubbish and IE is used I know nothing about Vista and if it can block access to the web somehow.

So:
- it's some sort of Vista lock
- some sort of Acer management thing that has locked up
- a trojan (but this is less likely I reckon)

??

[MidnightCowboy]

I too doubt that it's a trojan because the whole point of these things is that they want to phone home

How about trying a system restore back to a known point of good connection?
This might fix the Windows issues (if any) but I'm not sure about what input Acer has into these system functions.

I remember in another life once having a similarly temperamental FujiSiemens laptop and when this went awol you could reset it from a push-point on the base.

[chris.p]

OK, fixed it.

Did a hard reset, battery out etc.

Luckily there was a recent restore point 1 week back, an auto restore point at a Windows upgrade.

Ran that, it failed, ran it again, it worked. Few touch-ups and it's back 100%.

By hell it takes a long time though. For some reason this particular laptop takes about 4 minutes to boot, and the hard disk is working flat out for 10 minutes after that. It all took a long, long time. Hours of ticking over, doing stuff. Luckily you can just walk off and leave Vista to do its thing. Man that is so slow.

I think I'll tell him about disk images