Why would formatting be suppressed on all html pages on a particular computer?

January 12, 2007 6:38 PM

Why would formatting be suppressed on all html pages on a particular computer?

I'm doing my annual repair/cleanup of all the wacky things my parents do to their computer over the year, and have run into a bit of a puzzler. For some reason all webpages are rendered in the browser minus formatting. Background colors, text colors, frame borders, etc. are all somehow suppressed. This is true for both IE6 and Firefox2. Can anyone tell me the cause of this, or at least point me in the right direction?

posted by Manjusri to computers & internet (8 comments total)

Probably accessibility options have been set. For IE, do tools->settings. Select the "general" tab and press "accessibility". I bet you'll find that all three boxes (font styles, font sizes, and colors) are checked.

If that was the case when Firefox was installed, I suspect it probably set itself up the same way. But you'd have to find the appropriate settings in Firefox and unset them again separately.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 7:01 PM on January 12, 2007

Sorry, that's tools->Internet options.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 7:02 PM on January 12, 2007

The Accessibility options are not checked, but it is possible that the actual cause may be something related. One of the (very infrequent) users of this computer is blind, and a screenreading program (windoweyes) was installed sometime in the last year.

However, the primary computer for the blind user also has windoweyes, and does not suffer from the formatting problem.
posted by Manjusri at 9:08 PM on January 12, 2007

Try Start->Programs->Accessories->Accessibility and check the various applets there.

There's also an "accessibility" applet in the Control Panel.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 9:27 PM on January 12, 2007

A different possibility is that all HTML is currently feeding through a proxy which is changing them. I use such a proxy myself (something called "Proxomitron") but not for that purpose.

In IE: tools->internet options, select the "connection" tab, press the "LAN Settings" button, and see if there's some sort of proxy server set up. In my case it's 127.0.0.1 port 8080 (which means the proxy is a local program) but it doesn't have to be; it might be a proxy elsewhere on the web.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 9:32 PM on January 12, 2007

A different possibility is that all HTML is currently feeding through a proxy which is changing them.

This should be fairly easy to check by Viewing Page Source and seeing if the formatting is there.
posted by cillit bang at 9:50 PM on January 12, 2007

An additional thing for which you might check - there are options to disable the author's stylesheets in favor of the user's.
posted by adipocere at 10:46 PM on January 12, 2007

The problem seems to have been corrected while working on other issues. Unfortunately, I've tweaked several things since the last time I checked, so I'm not entirely clear what did the trick. It might have been something under the Accessibility applets, though I thought I didn't change any settings while going through them, and thus didn't check the results immediately.

I suspect that the problem was cleared up when I ran ccleaner (with nearly all options enabled) in an (unsuccessful) attempt to get rid of the vestiges of Nero Scout.

Thanks!
posted by Manjusri at 11:19 PM on January 12, 2007