What antivirus/firewall products do you run?

Do you have antivirus software installed on your computer?

Syd Lexia wrote:

Not if you don't consider those antivirus.

You have bigger problems than not seeing the captcha.

Uninstall Spybot and Malwarebytes, reboot, test captcha.

Then go get Security Essentials.

Syd Lexia wrote:

GPFontaine wrote: Syd Lexia wrote: Not if you don't consider those antivirus. You have bigger problems than not seeing the captcha. Uninstall Spybot and Malwarebytes, reboot, test captcha. Then go get Security Essentials. Neither of them run in the background?

Some versions of each will run in the background, however they aren't antivirus products. They are anti-malware products. That is different.

The real test is to do what I said and remove all of them, then test it. When they are removed you should only run this test on a Capcha and then quickly get Security Essentials (a real antivirus) on your system.

Syd Lexia wrote:

If they have Always On settings, I disabled them long ago. I am very conscious about how many background processes I have running, because my computer is so old, and I do my best to minimize them in order to optimize my CPU usage. I downloaded, installed, updated, and ran Security Essentials. It didn't find anything. Also, I think you underestimate Malwarebytes and Spybot. Despite their names, they will find pretty much anything you don't want on your computer. Besides, the days of "viruses" and "worms" are pretty much gone. These days it's all trojans, malware, and zombieware, all of which those programs are designed to find.

You are wrong and you missed the point.

Antivirus companies have this one major thing in common. They agree to share all of their research and data about viruses. If your product is a true antivirus, you are part of the collective that pools this type of info and works together. Product offerings from different companies have different features, however they all use the same pool of knowledge.

Malware fighting companies don't have this collective agreement. At least I am unaware of any.

Personally Windows Defender is good enough for my needs on the Malware front, however Spybot and Malwarebytes are both good options. None of them is an antivirus product. Security Essentials is, and as far as I know, it now bundles Defender (I don't really pay attention since Windows 7 has Defender built in). AVG and Avast would be some of your other free Antivirus options.

Your one man crusade against antivirus is foolish and ultimately reckless. I suggest you rethink your strategy here.

In any case, like I said. Remove them all, make sure you aren't blocking a DNS for images via some ad-blocking embedded tool. Also you should check any extensions in the browsers such as Adblock.

Once you figure this out, your life would be easier with just Security Essentials/Defender. Also, go get Mywot.com and you'll be all squared away.

Syd Lexia wrote:

Well, as I said, I did install Security Essentials, and then I got asked to do like 8 Windows Updates, which I also did. Still no luck. I used to use AVG, but it got too intrusive. It kept auto-removing Alexa without my permission.

It isn't always the things that you do, it is sometimes the order in which you do them.

Uninstall AV & Malware products along with any ad-blocking. Then reinstall after you verify they aren't causing the problem.

On XP it could be a hosts file, or it could be a bad stack. There are a lot of options, however we can't rule any of them out and work through the issue until Syd does the most basic tests first. In this case, we need to see if a friendly program is out of sorts and is running a blocking utility.

Try Firefox in Safemode.
http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Safe%20Mode