I just reread this thread and noticed your comment about having tried IE8 and not liking it. Did you try it on the computer you are now having problems with? If you did, how did you remove it? Also, if it was on this computer, what kind of problems caused you to remove it?
I'm asking this to see if there are some clues here.
I did an internet search on this topic and found very few posts, 96 total, half of them in another language. After removing duplicates and same posters, it seems to come down to about a dozen people having this issue (most of whom, like you, posted to two or more help forums).
The most common response (other than "my AV is better than your AV" ) in all the forums was that this seemed like a malware problem. You yourself were asked at another site to provide a HijackThis log, which you didn't do at the time because it appeared that a Live Update had fixed the problem. I think what many of us are concerned about is that this behavior you describe in many ways mimics an attempt at hijacking your browser. If you do decide to provide a HijackThis log, you will get expert help here in doing so -- and it has been done for these boards by totally novice users.
There are a number of possibilities and the questions being posed are being asked so that we can quickly eliminate most of these possibilities. At the moment, we only have your confidence that your computer has no infections, that this is solely a NAV issue. What I have found over the years, is that an uncompromised computer using uncompromised software has no problems. Period. When something is going wrong, removing the piece that SEEMS to cause the problem has never been enough for me. I need to know what is really happening, just in case something hidden might turn out to wreck my computer six months down the ride.
If you read these boards a lot, you will see I often resort to metaphors and analogies. Here is my latest.
My wife drives a really noisy car. We've been told that much of that noise is the result of tire noise (which is consistent with our own guesses). Suppose now that we invest sufficient money to upgrade to top-of-the-line super quiet tires. Immediately, my wife notices that when she is on the highway, there is a click that occurs every minute or so. Her immediate assumption is that there is something wrong with the tires or with their installation or that the mechanics damaged the car while changing the tires. Because we kept the original tires (heaven knows why - perhaps to make sleds out of for the winter), we have the new tires taken off and the old ones put back. Voila! Problem solved.
Well, not quite. You see, the click was still there, but masked by the noise of the old tires. The quiet new tires revealed a problem, but were not the cause of it. So now the problem that the click represents continues and worsens. Eventually, it forces itself on us in a way we can't ignore; and the cost of that repair far exceeds what the cost would have been to analyze and repair the original click.
mij
N360 2013, v.20.1.0.24; Win7 Pro, SP1 (32 bit), IE 9, Firefox 14, No other active securityware
