Cannot change Home Page

Hi, I've been experiencing a problem where I cannot change my Home Page. The odd thing is it is not stuck to some porn site or other junk site, but is rather stuck to the site that I used as my home page for the last 5 years; my old college website. Needless to say, not that I don't go to that school any more I figure it was time to switch to a more usefull home page; something simple like Google. Unfortunatly I have exhausted every method I know of to try an change it, and it always goes back to the college home page. This includes changing it in the browser internet options, in the control panel, changing it in safe mode, and even in the registry. In fact, trying to change it in the registry produces the message: "Cannot edit Start Page: Error writing the value's new contents." I'm running XP, and have both Spybot S&D and Ad-Aware SE Personal fully updated, and completed scans with each. I've also tried to follow some of your "do this before posting" topics, so I downloaded and ran ATF Cleaner, and then downloaded and ran AVG Anti-Spyware in safe mode as instructed. Unfortunatly it is tough for me to pinpoint when this issue first occured, because due to the nature of my job I tend to be gone for long perods of time, i.e. the last six months. And like I said, this has been my home page for the last 5 years, and I have never really tried to change it untill now, so it could be that old, or it could be a brand new problem. Anyway, here are the logs from HiJackThis and AVG. Hopefully someone will be able to spot what's wrong. Edited by paws HJT logs uplifted as attachments 📎HJT_AVG_logs.txt

Hi, Welcome to the WTT forums.
Sorry to hear about the problems with your browser's home page being locked.

This can be caused by malware, and if you want a malware removal expert to analyse your logs then it would be best to go here:

http://forums.whatthetech.com/Welcome_New_…ers_t34502.html

follow the directions carefully and post your logs (not the attachments) and an expert malware fighter will respond to you as soon as possible. Sometimes it's necessary to wait for a response, as the number of folks needing their expert assistance sometimes exceeds the number of trained expert malware fighters available. Never the less be assured they will get to everyone's post as soon as they can.

We don't analyse the logs here on this subforum and you will see that I have edited your post so that folks using a search engine (hopefully!) won't see your own logs in full in this subforum, otherwise we could get submerged, if they choose to post their logs here as well!

Quite often Spybot Search and Destroy, (an excellent program that you have wisely installed on your machine) can be responsible for blocking a change in your home page. (Trying to protect you from the bad guys)

It might be sensible to check this out as its quite easy to fix.

1Open Spybot Search and Destroy
2 Click on Mode
3 Set to advanced
4 Click on Tools
5 Double click on IE Tweaks

Here you will see the tick/checkmark boxes to lock or unlock the homepage
6 Select according to requirements
7 Click apply
Now see how you go…it may just do the trick
Regards
paws

Thanks for pointing me to the right place. I've gone ahead and re-posted my problem and logs there. I apologize for not figuring that out the first time. You can go ahead and close/lock this post if you want to avoid confusion.