Iexplore.exe

Alienfingers

I have Kaspersky 6.0 security on my pc, the hacker alert came up the other morning regarding IEXPLORE.EXE saying "executable file has been changed, should the program be granted network access". My g'friend clicked BLOCK and since then internet explorer will not work. It keeps saying "cannot open the search page". I have used firefox to get on net and redownload IE, and when tried using it the hacker alert came up again and I clicked ACCEPT this time but it still won't work. I've done bit of googling and read about how IEXPLORE.EXE can be both a valid program (part of internet explorer) and a virus, and it depends on where it is found on the pc that determines which it is-confusing!! Have I understood that right? I did a search for any files with that name on my computer and it was found in:

C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer
C:\WINDOWS\system32\dllcache
C:\WINDOWS\SoftwareDistribution\Download\

and also the following files showed up:

IEXPLORE.EXE-2D97EBE6.pf in C:\WINDOWS\Prefetch

and

iexplore.exe.mui in C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\en-US

I've been using Firefox since then and am actually liking it so might not even go back to IE but could do with knowing if theres anything I need to be worried about. I've done a full scan of computer with Kaspersky and AdAware and nothing has shown up. Should I be concerned at all?

JonnyThunder

It looks to me like you've added a rule into Kaspersky's blocking list, which is disallowing iexplore.exe from doing anything with the network. You can likely remove this rule if it really bothers you, but if you're gonna be using firefox (which i recommend!) then I wouldn't bother.

There are other programs which rely on IE for some of their components however, and not sure if it will affect them or not.