Strange IE7 / XP problem

[BELphotos]

I am currently on the east coast for a few weeks and stopped by an old friend's home for coffee. Sooner or later talk turns to photography and my new website. I give him the URL and he goes into the next room to plug it in. He comes back and says it's NG. Naturally, I take the bait and go to look. When I saw the screen, I knew it was going to be a late night. I asked his wife to make a big pot of coffee.

The screen fonts were about twelve feet high and all of his windows were pure white. It was as if his Accessibility options had gone berzerk. It turns out that one of the grandsons was at the computer when my pal was in the hospital a couple of months ago. Ah... innocent youth; yeah right.

Well we stared off by running Windows updates, moving to IE 7, updating AOL (yeah I know, but they are old time AOL people and set in their ways), and making sure that the Norton dat-file was up to snuff and then ran a full scan. No problems. Needless to say the machine was rebooted many times during these processes and a Java update also appeared.

After all this, several hours later, the screens returned to normal color for AOL and fonts sizes were also restored. At this point we tried my website again... www.BELPhotos.com (http://www.BELPhotos.com). The AOL browser choked and turned white with just the outline of the opening slideshow. Knowing that AOL depends on IE for it's setting I launched IE7. Lo and behold, same results. A quick check of another SmugMug pro site yielded the same, and the SmugMug home page, pretty much the same. Known sites such as the Washington Post, Yahoo, Google, all yielded a very strange screen that I can only describe as half a GUI. Yep... some stuff in graphics, some in just plain text.

Now I expected that the AOL browser may not be friendly; I had to always tell AOL users to use IE for the newspaper website I used to run.

Enough of the background - that's the writer/editor in me.

Question 1: Has anyone seen this problem before and were you able to solve it.

Question 2: Do you or anyone you know use AOL to access SmugMug websites.

I know, I know.... Firefox is the way to go. You are preaching to choir on that front. However, my friends are not that savvy with computers and AOL fills their needs. They waited for two months until I arrived to ambush (said lovingly) me into fixing their computer.

I am contemplating doing a delete of IE7 totally and then grabbing a fresh copy. I just hate to delete something that MS says is no longer part of the OS, only to find myself with a dead mouse after delete.

So if anyone has any suggestions, fire away, I'm listening.

[docwalker]

It almost sounds like junior did a right click on the desktop, clicked properties and changed stuff there.

The display sizes, window colors, and font sizes are all controlled from that set of menus. Given the signs you are seeing, I would have them check there.

I never understood by MS made it so easy to change that stuff. Change the display settings accidentaly and you are dead in the water with the monitor.

--Doc

The often ambushed for computer help Hero

[docwalker]

Also, after having the kid online... I would recommend doing a full system AV scan for malware, spyware, and viruses.

Kids are often baited to websites with games. In the background bad stuff is being loaded onto the computer.

I have seen several viruses that will change screen resolution, colors, and fonts as well.

[BELphotos]

Thanks for the reply Doc.

Today I did some heavy duty scrubbing on their system.

1) Cleaned up all the junk on the desktop. Must have been 50 shortcuts on the desktop, all pointing to programs availble in the Start Menu.

2) Ran Disk Cleanup and deleted a BAZILLION temp files. Yeah that's more than a GAZILLION temp files.

3) Downloaded and ran AdAware
Had seven critical hits, comprised of data miners and a dialer.
Had 127 minor hits, all tracking cookies... typical.
Deleted all of that stuff.

4) Made sure that their Norton Live Update and Scans were running.
All of that stuff was okay, but why didn't the all powerful Norton pick up the stuff that AdAware found? Interesting question.

5) Downloaded Firefox and installed.

6) Deleted IE7 and downloaded again thru Firefox. I know what you're thinking... why bother with IE at all? Have to; AOL which they are hooked on is depentent on IE7 for its values.

7) Installed IE7 and went through all the reboots.

So now the system is really zipping on startup, AOL is all fixed, the weird screens, for the most part are gone.

Here comes the acid test... bringing up my pride and joy... www.BELphotos.com (http://www.BELphotos.com). Well, we know that AOL does not like it. So we go to the freshly loaded IE7; does not show the black theme or the slide show.

Okay, frusttration now becoming more evident as I pound on the desk, I launch Firefox; same result. White browser window, no slide show, and of course all controls that are white not visble.

This really has me baffled. My website, SmugMug home, and any other websites that I tried all are not showing correctly no matter what browser.

I know these posts are long, but I am trying to give as much backgroung info as possible in the hope that someone looking has run into this problem.

Thanks everyone for reading and wondering what the heck is going on here along with me. :dunno

[Sheaf]

Is Flash installed?

http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/

[BELphotos]

Just had my buddy install Flash 9 player by phone. After the install we did a reboot and tried all the browsers: AOL, IE7 and Firefox. The results are the same where there should be black there is white, the frame for the slideshow and the buttons are there, the photos for the slideshow are not.

Other elements and thumbnail photos of the page are there, except anything in white. Additionally, the slideshow appears to be running. This I can tell because of the slight shift in the page for odd size photos running in the show.

Recap on system specs:
one year old HP Pavillion desktop system
512Kb memory
Windows XP Home Edition - SP2 - up to date
according to all Norton and AdAware - squeaky clean

[docwalker]

I know it may seem silly but I did not see you say it was done. Even though you uninstalled IE, the cache and cookie files remain. Have you tried dumping those?

[BELphotos]

Yeah Doc... all files deleted, cookies, etc., IE closed, system rebooted, IE props opened only and double check cookies and cache deletion. Then remove IE and installed fresh copy right from MS website.

Bruce