New browser opens everytime I press ENTER

Good day, folks!

The title says it all. Since yesterday when I press the ENTER button (in Word, while saving a file, whatever), a new browser window pops up - not even in the background, no, the screen switches from Word to the browser which I then have to close or minimize. In the latter case new browser windows will open, too, but at least the screen doesn't switch to them. However, after a couple of minutes I'll have 50 browsers in the task bar, and they slow down the performance. In other words, working at the comp is nigh impossible right now.

So I thought to myself: Well, maybe my Firefox is faulty, I'll update to version 2.0. No sooner said than done, but the problem remained. Okay, so I changed the setting and made the IE the standard browser again. That yielded a big change: Now it was the IE that popped up everytime I hit ENTER.

I honestly don't know what to do anymore. Will some PC crack please help me?

Zorro

How ya doing, buddy?

First, thanks for the reply, folks. No, the browser starts just as usual as if I had opened it myself, starting at the starting page. I did scans with AntiVir, Ad-Aware, Spybot, to no avail, everything seems to be in order, and my firewall did not mention any change in the registry.

What I've noticed, however, is that this problem popped up after I shut the comp down with the usual "updates have been downloaded, click here to shut down and install them, click here to shut down without installing them" and so on. This message continued to pop up everytime I shut the PC down (which had me wondering why there were so frequent updates all of a sudden). Maybe there was a slight hiccup with the installation of the updates?

Zorro

PS: By the way, in the meantime I had to restore the system because working at the PC had become absolutely impossible. The hiccup message ("click here to shut down and install" etc.), however, still remains.

Zorro

There's nowhere I can't reach.

It isn't. As usual I allowed it to install and shut down, but the next time there was another update that wanted to get installed... and another and another and another. If I allowed the installation or if I didn't didn't make a difference; only by a system restoration I got rid of the browser problem, but the comp still wants to install some updates whenever I shut it down. But at least I can live with this, with the browser problem I couldn't

Zorro

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Originally Posted by Domino

I think I may have found something that disables the shut-down and install updates message when you shut-down your PC

Thanks for the research, Domino, but the messages don't bother me at all – what bothers me is that my comp fakes installing updates and makes me wonder if I'll ever be able to install actual updates again. (Getting rid of these messages would mean getting rid of a message with an actual update after all.)

But wait, it gets better, because the browser problem has returned. Two system restorations later I can say with certainty that it's back for good – unlike before, restoring the system to an earlier point does nothing. So I deleted my standard browser, FireFox, downloaded the new IE 7, but didn't set it up as the standard browser. (By the way, can you change the standard browser outside of the browser, anywhere in the system?) So, with no standard browser there's nothing to pop up when I hit ENTER, so far, so good. But now the browser (the IE 7 in this case) returns to the starting page whenever I hit ENTER. (Somehow my system seems to think something has to happen when I hit this button besides what I want to happen.) That means that I have to write replies to a message board – like this one – in Word and that I have to break the habit of hitting ENTER when saving a website or graphic or whatever instead of hitting the save button.

Zorro, still resisting the urge to smash this computer to smithereens

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?