Can't Get to India From Here

One of my regular clients, from south Florida, called recently in need of an initial remote computer checkup and more specifically an Internet Explorer repair. It seems that he could not got to a number of his favorite websites, including the Times of India, www.timesofindia.com, with his family's relatively new laptop computer.

As a matter of form, along with a number of usual procedures, I removed several pieces of expired, trial and otherwise crapware, including, Error Smart and Uniblue Registry booster., and McAfee Internet Security. Then I tried to get to his site. No go. Odd, it brings up the Yahoo search page showing links to the Times of India but even when I click them we still can't get there.

Well, I can get there from my computer, so the site is obviously up and running. Next I downloaded and installed Firefox 3, letting it import their homepage and favorites but taking care not to let it become the default browser, to see if it were an Internet Explorer specific problem or a general access issue. Firefox couldn't get there either.

It also took over as the default browser so I had to correct and adjust.

Went to the control panel and checked the properties of the Internet connections and found that the local area network (LAN) settings were not set to Automatically detect settings, so I set it and tried again. No good.

Ran McAfee uninstaller - viola! Hello India!!!!!!!!!

Once again, as I had recently seen with Norton Internet Security, even though the product was uninstalled there were sufficient remnants left behind to adversely affect the machines ability to navigate the network and their additional "Special" uninstallers had to be used to get them sufficiently out of the system.