OK, first I want to thank everyone who suggested possible fixes. Oh, and I'm currently running Vista and I.E. 8.
Second, a bit of background on my antivirus/antimalware: I use Norton. When I got the latest edition of Norton, it included what it called the "idle time" scan. I'd been running a scheduled weekly full scan, but a note on the new edition's settings page told me if I did that, it'd turn off the idle time scan, meaning it wouldn't scan for problems anytime it had ten or fifteen minutes to spare, something like that. So I tried relying on the new system.
What I hadn't allowed for is that the folks at Norton apparently expected that I'd routinely leave my computer running at full power, not in Sleep mode (which I only recently found out how to activate, anyway), for three or four hours at a shot -- the time it needs to do a good full scan. Ummm, no; if I had nothing to do on the computer for that long, I'd been shutting it down completely or, lately, putting it into Sleep. The upshot was that when I set aside those three-plus hours yesterday afternoon/evening and ran the full scan, Norton found and quarantined 39 tracking cookies it hadn't detected before -- and now my D.E.P. problem seems to have gone away. Just from an abundance of tracking cookies, apparently.
So, now I'll be setting aside those three or four hours for a full scan one day a week, although I still can't schedule it automatically without turning off the idle time scan.
As far as changing browsers is concerned, I'm considering it, but in view of the disaster when I tried to upgrade from Vista to Windows 7*, I'm really leery of changing things I already don't know or understand very much about.
At any rate, thank you all once again.
* The system locked itself into a loop in which it kept re-starting, declaring that the upgrade had failed and it'd reset to Vista, and then re-starting, declaring.... In the end, the only way I could find to break the loop was to do a system recovery, wiping all files and programs that hadn't been on the computer when I bought it in 2007. The only thing that saved it from being a complete disaster was the backup on the external memory my sister got me for my birthday (at the same time she bought me Windows 7). I was able to restore all of my files, and most of the programs.
Note that I'd also created a backup on CDs -- but after the recovery, the computer refused to reload anything from the CD backup, because it didn't remember having ever done a backup, and thus wouldn't accept the information on the CDs as a valid backup. Since my reason for creating a CD backup was in case I had to do a system recovery from it, I'm left wondering what the people at Microsoft were thinking to make that impossible.
-----
Big Brother is watching you. And damn, you are so bloody BORING.
Second, a bit of background on my antivirus/antimalware: I use Norton. When I got the latest edition of Norton, it included what it called the "idle time" scan. I'd been running a scheduled weekly full scan, but a note on the new edition's settings page told me if I did that, it'd turn off the idle time scan, meaning it wouldn't scan for problems anytime it had ten or fifteen minutes to spare, something like that. So I tried relying on the new system.
What I hadn't allowed for is that the folks at Norton apparently expected that I'd routinely leave my computer running at full power, not in Sleep mode (which I only recently found out how to activate, anyway), for three or four hours at a shot -- the time it needs to do a good full scan. Ummm, no; if I had nothing to do on the computer for that long, I'd been shutting it down completely or, lately, putting it into Sleep. The upshot was that when I set aside those three-plus hours yesterday afternoon/evening and ran the full scan, Norton found and quarantined 39 tracking cookies it hadn't detected before -- and now my D.E.P. problem seems to have gone away. Just from an abundance of tracking cookies, apparently.
So, now I'll be setting aside those three or four hours for a full scan one day a week, although I still can't schedule it automatically without turning off the idle time scan.
As far as changing browsers is concerned, I'm considering it, but in view of the disaster when I tried to upgrade from Vista to Windows 7*, I'm really leery of changing things I already don't know or understand very much about.
At any rate, thank you all once again.
* The system locked itself into a loop in which it kept re-starting, declaring that the upgrade had failed and it'd reset to Vista, and then re-starting, declaring.... In the end, the only way I could find to break the loop was to do a system recovery, wiping all files and programs that hadn't been on the computer when I bought it in 2007. The only thing that saved it from being a complete disaster was the backup on the external memory my sister got me for my birthday (at the same time she bought me Windows 7). I was able to restore all of my files, and most of the programs.
Note that I'd also created a backup on CDs -- but after the recovery, the computer refused to reload anything from the CD backup, because it didn't remember having ever done a backup, and thus wouldn't accept the information on the CDs as a valid backup. Since my reason for creating a CD backup was in case I had to do a system recovery from it, I'm left wondering what the people at Microsoft were thinking to make that impossible.
-----
Big Brother is watching you. And damn, you are so bloody BORING.