Internet Explorer Troubles

[ddrabant]

I just recently re-installed Windows XP Pro on a friends computer after she was bombarded with more than 400 parasites. Before I did the re-install I went through her system and removed as many of the parasites I was able to and it turned out that most of ehr data had been corrupted, but Internet Explorer was not working then. After the complete format and re-install, Internet Explorer worked fine for about the first 24 hours with no problems at all. But after the first 24 hours there has been trouble with Internet Explorer as well as Mozilla Firefox not wanting to load up any web pages at all. But the thing that I am really needing any help with is that sometimes Internet explorer will work fine and then 10 minutes later it is not wanting to load anything again. Any suggestions as to what may be wrong would be greatly appreciated.

[Xpenetrator]

Hi ddrabant,

you did not mention how you set up and secured the fresh installed system. Hence this shot in the dark:

The system was re-infected within 24 hours, the same way it was infected before - through open ports or by visiting the same website, using IE. On my internet connection, my system wouldn't survive 2 minutes without a decent firewall and without all recent MS-patches, it would be infected just by visiting websites, if I would visit them. Part of the problem is IE itself, allowing bad guys to exploit its countless security gaps. So if you postponed updating XP with *all* the stuff for some reason, your friend might have done the same thing as she did
before to get in trouble. Never (!) power up the modem without all needed patches.

How old is the XP-Pro CD? Does it contain any service packs?
At least *I* can't load service packs and hotfixes from the MS site without firewall protection which means that I can't connect simply into the internet with a fresh installed XP without SP2 (or at least SP1?).

As always, cross-checking with a "Knoppix" (or similar) "Live-CD" (means booting an alternative operating system from CD) is a good idea to see if this is related to XP, or maybe to a wacky network card / modem / internet connection issue, which is the other idea. Since it is a fresh installation, network setup issues may occur.