I recently encountered a VERY random problem on my Vista machine.  I didn’t do anything out of the ordinary, my Windows Update settings were modified to not download or install updates without me doing so manually – which I hadn’t done in a long time, and I haven’t installed or modified anything.  But, for some reason, IE7 just decided to freeze when I opened it.  I restarted my computer, it still froze; I ran IExplorer with no add-ons, and it still froze.  I used Firefox to do some research and found alot of people have had this problem but no one had a definitive answer.  If running IE7 without add-ons didn’t work, people just gave up.  Well, I have a solution.

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It’s true – to stay safe on the internet, it is always good to have protection from malware, adware, and spyware.  These are annoying, and, quite often, dangerous.  So what do we do to stay protected?  We get programs like SpyBot Search & Destroy, or protection from McAfee and Norton.  We do a scan, the program finds  some problems, you go through the process, and at the end – it shows a few things that couldn’t be fixed, but can be removed.  It warns us that removing that file could potentially make some programs on the computer run improperly.  Without thinking, we delete those files.  The next thing we know, we’re booting up to nothing but a mouse cursor and a black screen.  What happened?  If you’re a Windows user, and this has happened to you – you should read this.

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