Firefox and all browsers instantly crash when I try to search anything

Future Hero · 09-30-2009, 04:54 AM

This happened to me a week ago.
For no apparent reason, Firefox started crashing on me whenever I try to search anything in google. As soon as I hit the search button, it instantly crashes with the "We're sorry, Firefox had a problem and needed to close" message. IE does the "IE stopped working" error, and Opera instantly crashes as well.
Only Google Chrome seems to work with no problems, but I really like firefox and want to fix this as fast as I can.

Also:
-System Restore doesn't work since I don't have any checkopints.
-I really don't want to re-install Windows since someone else installed all my drivers originally and told me he had a lot of issues with the sound-card ones before he got them working.
-I also ran into a little virus trouble , but avast! told me it was a minor threat and removed it quickly.
-Firefox portable crashes as well.

The only thing that might be related to this issue was that about a month ago, I encountered the "black screen with mouse pointer" problem and repaired it using this link: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/itprovistadesktopui/thread/193b7008-ce4b-4d03-acc3-b8d7ffe610d5

Quote:

1) Use the vista DVD to go to the repair mode.
2) From the same screen where you do the system restore, there's an option to open an administrative command prompt.
3) That should open in X:\Sources or something like that
4) Go to the windows drive by entering C:
5) Now go to the windows event log folder on your machine (C:\Windows\System32\winevt):
cd c:\windows\system32\winevt
6) ren Logs Logs_bad
7) mkdir Logs
This will create an empty folder for new event logs.

Any help would be greatly appreciated and sorry for any bad grammar.