Unfortunately that is the only thing that I can thing of that would cause anything like this.
Based on the comment you say she made
I had noticed that when I turned Avast off, that I would be unable to access any form of web pages. That is indicative of a proxy having been set and when the web shield is disabled there is no proxy and a failure would occur, though there should normally be an associated error message relating to a proxy not being available, etc.
The manual proxy settings would also have to have been checked in the IE settings also.
Have (or did) she another Anti-Virus installed in this system, if so what was it and how did you get rid of it ?
The problem is that avast doesn't really hook the internet connections other than its localhost proxy redirecting the http port 80 traffic. This should either work or fail for all sites (http) across all browsers and not just for some pages, it is this inconsistency that is throwing me.
Now at no point was it mentioned how she '
removed avast!' as if it wasn't via the windows add remove programs then there could be some remnants of avast.
Download the avast! Uninstall Utility,
find it here aswClear5.exe and save it to your HDD.
- 1. Now uninstall avast! (using add remove programs, if it is still on the add remove list, if it isn't, start from the next step), reboot.
- 2. run the avast! Uninstall Utility from safe mode for the version of avast she had installed, once complete reboot into normal mode.