Google homepage changing

Hi, I'm new here, have been online for years with no significant mal/spyware problem, presumably due to decent protection of various kinds. However recently an odd thing happened. For some reason my home page google.com (which defaults to the co.uk version due to my location) often changes to google.fr instead. It seems superficially due to a BH of some kind, but it's not (mis)directing me to a sleazy sales page - only the French version of Google. Nor does it always happen. Never did at all until a month ago. Although I do have Gallic sympathies, I doubt even Gates could design an OS smart enough to intuit these. I run a McAfee firewall, AVG anti-virus, Ad-Aware, Spysweeper, Counterspy, Trojan Hunter, and SpywareGuard. My OS is XP. I recently bought a program called Spyware Bot but only run it occasionally. Frankly I'm mystified and don't want the cost or hassle of a reinstall. What do I do? All help much appreciated, Searcher3 P.S. What is slyware, btw?

With only one Tab open in Firefox, paste this into the address bar: http://www.google.co.uk/ and then click Go
Next go to Tools > Options… > General Tab and click the Use Current Pages button.
This should set your Homepage to Google.co.uk.

Google seem to be having issues at the minute and the above will get around the problem until things sort themselves out.

What is slyware

There are various names for the slime that you can pick up while surfing - malicious software was shortened to malware, slyware is just another name for it.