I haven't used HijackThis in a long time, so I can't be much help there.  In your autorun, I see some interesting stuff.

If memory serves, Roboform is a critter you don't want crawling around.  That CjmBrowserHelperObject by MindJet (who I'm not familiar with) sounds suspicious.  As Dan mentioned, BHO's are often not your friend.  The "SnagIt" IE add-on also sounds suspicious to me.

I'd start by disabling at least those 4 items (SnagIt is listed at least twice,) rebooting, and see if its any better.  Either way, a thorough malware scan from safe mode is never a bad idea in cases like this.

Wow.  You got lotsa stuff.  My HiJackThis scan is only 25 lines long (not counting the processes report), and my Autoruns IE tab has only one item in it.  Then again, I don't install extra IE toolbars (I hate 'em), and I use virtual machines for a lot of my websurfing.

The HJT log shows several "missing file" lines... that wouldn't be causing your problem, but it's worth cleaning those up while you're at it.

The only obvious baddy is WO.exe in the last line.  You never want to see something running out of your temp directory on startup, so that's always a tipoff.  OTOH, it's one of the "file missing" entries, so maybe a prior problem that got cleaned in a virus scan later?

The rest looks legit (not that I'm all that familiar with a lot of it), but that doesn't mean it couldn't be causing the problem.  I'd zero in on the O2, O4, and O23 lines, as the others probably don't autostart.

In particular, I notice a lot of license verification or authentication kind of services starting up... maybe one of those is launching an IE stub and hanging--maybe a file got corrupted, or maybe there's a problem at the other end of the internet that the service is trying to connect to for authentication?

(Not that I'm familiar with how they're designed to operate, but are all those authentication services shown in 'Running processes' supposed to be there?  I can understand something starting when you launch the program, but even if you're not using the program?  I'm not saying you should try to shut them off, but just that it might be a clue worth investigating whether one of them is not shutting down when it's supposed to and hanging IE.)

You've also got some "updater" kinds of services autostarting... not that they're necessarily bad, but maybe one of them is stalling.  FWIW, I always remove those update-checker items from my startup.

One that caught my eye is GoogleToolbarNotifier.exe, one of the O4 startup lines.  Okay, I've seen that in the startup sequence on a lot of clients' systems, but I assumed it just launched on startup, checked your toolbar version, and shut down if you were up to date.  Does it really leave a process running, as shown in the 'Running processes' list?  Wow.

You've also got Startup Delayer and Outpost Firewall loading at startup... maybe one of those is interfering with one of the internet verification services?  I'd try disabling both of those and seeing if it makes any difference.

Spanky wrote on Jun 7^th, 2009 at 8:38pm:

That's what virtual machines are for.   


Spanky wrote on Jun 7^th, 2009 at 8:38pm:

Well, okay... but didn't I see Panda in your HJT scan?