Well, all of this trouble started when that Conficker virus started going around. I have AVG Free, and at the house we didnt have the internet really at the time. I have a wireless adapter for the PC, but I dont use it. My wife decided to try it out, and it found a network and automatically connected to it as well as the internet, and I'm assuming that it caught something before AVG could update (the definitions were probably over a year old at that point). I can't get onto any anti virus sites, I cant get onto any microsoft sites, everytime I click a link in google or yahoo it directs me to ad pages. I thought it was conficker, and I've tried downloading all of the programs that supposedly find and kill it. I couldnt access them from this PC, so I got them from my parents PC and transferred them via USB drive. All of the programs said they couldn't find anything wrong. AVG fails to connect when it tries to update its definitions. I just now went to my parents and got the newest definitions and installed them manually. All of the problems are still here. The only thing that AVG found in it's scan was cookies (which were removed). I can't go to the malwarebytes page to get that, or the superantispyware page to get that. they come up connection interrupted, just like all the other anti virus pages do. Hijackthis does the same thing. So, we won't have any help from those, at least not right now. that makes the 8 step thing down to 5 steps. crapcleaner works, at least. It fixed the google problem, however Ive donw as many steps as i could now and I still can't go to any of those sites. What next?