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General discussion

Mozilla Attack/Crash/Erasure Upon Leaving Trusted Site......

Jan 10, 2006 5:00PM PST

After viewing & posting on I site I've known & used for years, I left site by clicking "Home" in my most current Mozilla.Exactly as I do almost every night. Instantly, computer crashed and rebooted. Re-opened Moz. and found ALL 300+ carefully collected bookmarks were erased along with all set preferences, cookie settings, home page(blank),form fill in stored data, & virtually all contents of profile (excepting profile itself). All remaining settings had been reset to Mozilla defaults.(Home page now Mozilla, not blank).
Second persons profile on same machine un-affected as best as I can tell.
Additionally, epson printer (connected) froze up during 1st printing task after episode(printing out some instructions for Mozilla).
Also several Windows XP functions seemed affected and threw up warning balloons and comp wouldn't shutdown in immediate (normal) way.
After many hours, I retrieved Sept/05 archived bookmarks(+/-50) and imported them. Reset all, ran checkdisk and got all functioning again. All completed without re&re of Mozilla.
In 6 years using Moz., I have never had any problem of any kind with it. Complete disbelief!!
Has anyone heard of such a case or expierenced such a thing before?? What turned out to be the cause?
Just surprised that this came less than 1 week after my WMF attack & patching w/ WMFFIX.exe.Could Patch have affected Moz?? Moz does have a few plug-ins like Acrobat reader & Flash (Macromedia)which was/is disabled(to prevent drive by installs) unless needed.
Further Moz (_12) has IDN patch installed & History set to Zero days.
Thanks in advance for any tales or guesses !! Happy

Discussion is locked

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You didn't follow the forum rules.. :)
Jan 10, 2006 6:57PM PST

Did you scan for virus, spyware/adware etc.?

What it found?

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Sorry, Melati. Sys. Info In Profile. Yes, Did Scan With....
Jan 11, 2006 3:51PM PST

the following in both regular & safe modes(All current updated to date of episode):
Avg, Spybot, AdawareSE, Stinger. Not in safe mode:
Housecalls online & F-Secure Blacklight. Not one item found by any of above. Possible my correction actions may have eliminated some before those scans were done: Sys Restore,Chkdisk .
Event Viewer (other than notes about my purging printer) showed only 3 unusual items:
Event Viewers (E.V.)System:
Error. Source: IPnathlp. Event ID:32003 (1)
"System NAT unable to request an operation of the
kernel-mode translation module".

Event Viewer: Applications
Error. Source: VSS Event ID:8193 (2)
"Volume Shaddow Copy Error Calling Co-Create instance."

Error. Source: Event System Event ID:4609 (3)
"Com & Event System Detected an Unexpected Bad Return code during internal processing. HResult was 8007043c from line 44 d:\nt\com\com 1x\src\events\tier 1 event system obj.cpp."

Above means nothing to me but it's all I can find of technical nature during time of the episode.
As I said, all seems fine now after my repairs but am afraid to return to site (a Cdn. Travel Messageboard for Mexico) until I have a good guess as to what might have happened.
I wonder if Windows Meta File was needed using site. Did Not view any travel pics, only posted 2 text messages without links, although messages were in a thread already started which contained links to WMFFix download sites some of which had ".HTML" endings.(??).
" It's a Mystery, Charlie Brown!!!". Grin

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Update: Just Noticed: Attack Turned Off S&D Bad Download..
Jan 13, 2006 1:27PM PST

Blocker for I.E. No Apparent damage, just unchecked the box. Now rechecked and active. It's a mystery Charlie Brown!! Grin