Browser redirect woes using IE 7.0 and Firefox

Yes. Absolutely. Neither electr4onics hardware or the human body do to well with stray voltages running around. I already have the Dimension 8100 off, unplugged, and opened up, completely disconnected from all peripherals. –TvH

HFCG: I found the problem. XP Home was just reloaded on the errant PC. I don't know whether to be jubilant, relieved, or embarrassed, so I'll opt for all three… The problem was that there was no room left on the hard drive. I slaved the drive on the Dell Dimension XPS-T500, and the system checked the disk for consistency. 32K of bad sectors were found and noted (don;'t know about being fixed), alonmg with sime screwed-up file chains. Only 165,000 bytes (or so) were available for use on the disk. I ran Disk Cleanup to see if there was anything I could do about that, and was told that there were 6 GB of old System Restore files on the disk that could be removed. I had them removed, and got 1/6 of my disk back. I still saved everything from the drive onto my external hard drive–it was about 30 GB of stuff, and almost filled one of my partitions. After that was completed, I removed the drive from the XPS (carefully, of course), reinstalled it in the Dimension 8100 (just as carefully), fired it up, passed on booting from the CD, and it went into the on-screen XP setup menu. Apparently XP Setup had no place to move files around on the disk during re-installation, and that's why it shut down and went into a bootup cycle. The BSOD with the info never stayed up long enough for me to be able to read what it said. After I'm happy that things are normal, I'm creating a System Restore point, and then making sure that the XP won't create more without prompting someone about it, and giving the option to either not do so or to overwrite the existing one, if I so desire. 6 gig of restore points is a tad much… I'm still ordering a new hard drive. The drives on these two desktops are getting old, and I'm going to have to take care of this some day, I'm sure. I'm reupdating AVG Free 8.0-, and have the Zone Alarm Free firewall up and running. Now I'll make sure that SP3 loads correctly, and that the firewall doesn't get slammed because of it. Once that's done, IO'll post one last HJT log, unless it's not necessary. –Tom vonHatten

32K of bad sectors were found

This is still a bad sign.
Please back up all of your important data.

I've already done that. I did it while the drive was still slaved to the XPS. Thanks for the reminder, though. –TvH