about:blank causes explorer to crash

December 14, 2005 10:19 AM

My brother has an older Win98 machine on dialup. Recently, I had to clean it of viruses, and now internet explorer does not work. It goes to about:blank but as soon as you try any other address explorer crashes, saying that there is an exception in urlmon and that explorer will now close due to an internal error. The computer is second hand without any driver disks, so formatting is not really an option. Has anyone else encountered this or know how to fix it?
posted by blue shadows to computers & internet (8 comments total)

Are you getting an error something like "IExplore caused exception c0000006h, Urlmon.dll file linked missing export file"??

If so, your urlmon.dll and/or Wininet.dll file was corrupted/deleted when you removed the virus/spyware/malware. The info in this M$ knowledgebase document might help: Article 160158

More than that could you post the exact text of the error message and what version of IE you're using?
posted by sablazo at 10:26 AM on December 14, 2005

1. If you can still get into the OS, you should be able to get a list of the drivers you need, especially the network driver. Then just search for them online from your machine, copy the network driver onto a usb drive or floppy, install, then run Windows update.

2. Install Win2kSP4 or WinXPSP1or2 and all the drivers should be found. But make sure you have the network driver, just in case.
posted by MrMulan at 10:30 AM on December 14, 2005

3. I don't remember Win98 too well, but it may be possible to do repair install, where it reinstalls all the files again.
posted by MrMulan at 10:32 AM on December 14, 2005

I had a similar problem recently on my Win 98 PC. AskMe helped a me lot.

There are a lot of viruses that attack your wininet.dll - hosing your Explorer ability, and can sleep in your registry after your think you have deleted them. the lucky thing about Win 98 is that you can operate in DOS mode easily. I had to go into my DOS mode on boot up and rename the wininet.dll, and then add it again from a floppy disc. Drivers are widely available on the web - you can even make a fully serviceable floppy boot disc from the web. I got my driver from a kindly AskMe respondant. check out bootdisk.com for some.
posted by zaelic at 10:42 AM on December 14, 2005

I would recommend simply skipping using IE at all and installing Firefox, solving this and future spyware problems proactively.

Do you have the certificates for the licenses with the computer? If you don't, yours is not a legal copy of Windows, I think.
posted by unixrat at 10:59 AM on December 14, 2005

Remove Internet Explorer with the free version of 98lite, and stick to Firefox or Opera for a browser.
posted by ijsbrand at 11:38 AM on December 14, 2005

Viruses can certainly be nasty buggers, attacking via four or five different mechanisms. You may have a remnant of a virus munging the system, or a trashed registry setting, or a remaining trojaned or damaged system file.

I'm going to assume you have the ability to transfer files over to the sick machine from another (hopefully non-dialup) machine, besides the floppy drive shuffle. CD, USB stick, or network card, all of them should do the trick. Incidentally, if you don't have a CD or network card, but do have a floppy drive, you can still use a cheap USB stick with Windows 98 although it doesn't have the auto Win 2K or XP flashdrive support. I did it recently that recently for an old Win 98 computer: just copy the small USB driver to the floppy, follow the simple install, and it should see the USB stick just fine afterwards. Even a cheesy 128M stick available for a few bucks is big enough.

There a several potential solutions depending on circumstance. I'll try to hit the main ones, but there are others.

You can play whack-a-mole with the reported failures for a system file or two. As already noted, URLMON.DLL is a well-known file and can be copied from many places. Same with the file WININET.DLL, another common failure point. The only problem with that approach is that you may have to watch out for versioning issues, a problem which can largely mitigated by ensuring that you exactly match up OS versions, including service packs, when copying over files.

If no critical files were damaged by the viruses, then the mentioned Firefox solution is a likely fix. Firefox is far less intertwined with Windows internals than IE and what crashes IE will not necessarily crash Firefox. You can always uninstall and reinstall IE later should you choose, once you have a working browser. A nice thing about Firefox is that is a clean install that should be relatively quick to test as working or not and it won't disturb anything else.

However, if you do have damaged files, Firefox may not work either. If that is the case, you could try uninstalling IE to get rid of any potential failure points and then reinstalling it. IE installs/update various lower-level system files, including URLMON (at least in some IE versions). This web page
http://www.petri.co.il/download_the_full_ie_package.htm discusses how to get and install IE6. But since the IE6 install is a minimal executable which accesses the web to download most of itself as it installs, that may not be a working solution either if net access is completely trashed. However, IE 5.5 is reasonably stable (I still see sites using it) and you can download it as full self-contained executable off the links on the web page listed above. I just tried and the download links for IE 5.5 are still working. Frankly, for Win 98, I'd go straight to the full IE 5.5 download and if successful go from there for updates to IE 6/Firefox/Opera/browser of choice.

I would consider a full OS reinstall only as an absolute last resort, or means of saving time after a few abortive attempts at correction. Windows may not be Linux, but with some effort, these types of problems are almost always correctable. I've never had to do a full Windows OS reinstall since Win 95 except for one encryption lockout, even when supporting Joe User abused machines.

The legality of your copy of Windows almost certainly isn't a matter of concern. Many second-hand machines are running original install operating systems, and those remain legal even if the certificate has been lost in piles of documentation cruft. Only reinstalls of a Windows OS without transfer of title are illegal there. Also, since this is apparently an older home machine on dial-up, the odds of a legal encounter with the Business Software Alliance is effectively nil.
posted by mdevore at 12:15 PM on December 14, 2005

Thank you very much for all the suggestions. I shall certainly try Firefox. I do not have access to my brother's computer at the moment to post the error codes. There most likely are some damaged system files, because when I tried to clean the last 3 viruses, from within C:\Windows\System, I did get warning messages saying that if I deleted these files Windows might become unstable (the repair function did not work). I also strongly suspect there is still some nasty hidden spyware. I am going to try fixing it tomorrow.
posted by blue shadows at 7:44 PM on December 15, 2005