Over the weekend, a friend asked me to take a look at her PC and see
if I could fix it.  She said she couldn't get online, and wondered if
there was a problem with her DSL service.

  It turned out she has Vista Home, which I have almost no experience
with.

  If I launch IE, it comes up with a box telling me that it has stopped
working and must be closed.  Closing it and trying again achieves
nothing.
  I see some version of Norton in the system tray, but when I try to
open it, nothing happens.
  There seems to be a neat thing advising of solutions available to
problems -- maybe this is a feature of Vista? -- but clicking "Go online
and get the solution" appears to try to launch IE -- see above.
  The machine has an SD slot, so I tried putting a download of FireFox
on an SD (HC) card, but it didn't seem to recognize the card....

  Does any o this sound familiar?  I've heard of viruses blocking AV
programs and sites, but not of breaking IE altogether like this.

David Gillett

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