"Unsupported Compression"

[Wind-up Clock]

So I've got this rig right here, Dell Inspiron 530 system with XP-SP2 loaded on. 2 gigs of ram, hard drive barely touched. Avast, Ad-Aware, and Zonealarm are installed as the anti-virus package. It also has AOL software, which i can't seem to remove.

Something happened to it, because whenever i try to connect with Firefox, the page times out and an error pops up:

The Page you are trying to view cannot be shown because it uses an invalid or unsupported kind of compression

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Now, this pops up for EVERY page. And if it doesn't pop up for the page, it loads about 10% of it, maybe just the background, before it gives up the ghost.

And IE7 doesn't work either. It freezes before the page even loads.

To top it all off, Avast! is reporting a suspicious file, something to do with drivers or something. I'll get the name later on. (and it's a suspicious file, it didn't classify it as a virus), then it says it found a virus in the boot memory, but a boot scan doesn't seem to trudge up anything.

Strangely enough, it pings the loopback address normally.

I've tried boot scans, virus scans, safe mode scans, restarting, Using the
"repair" function in the My Network window, unplugging and replugging the cord, all bupkus

Google says something about an internal DNS problem.

What should i do?

[billiardball-1]

Firefox 2 or 3?
Have you tried reinstalling it?

As far as the AOL software goes, you can remove that manually by deleting the files and digging through your registry for all the AOL files and deleting them (always back up your registry before making changes!).

If uninstalling and reinstalling firefox doesn't do the trick, you might want to give it a shot manually like AOL. If IE7 is fucking up too that might not be the problem, but it's a fairly simple way to determine whether that's the case.

Also, how are you connecting to the internet? Router? Direct? Wifi or hardline?

[Wind-up Clock]

It's a cable to a wireless switch/hub (to be frank, i still can't tell the difference), which connects to a router, which connects to a line.

I think i've tried reinstalling FF, and i'm sure the version is 3.

And i don't feel comfortable with using the registry, so i'll leave that off.

And it's not just Firefox. Avast! won't update when i tell it to manually update, saying that it cannot connect to the server, but it gives me the "virus database has been updated" notice.

[billiardball-1]

I think you mean you've got a wireless router hooked up to a modem. Are other internet things working for you? AIM or something?

You've tried resetting the router and modem, yeah?

When did this problem develop and what changes came before it?

 
The registry really looks way scarier than it is. It's just a matter of looking through the software area for the entries you don't want anymore. Pretty straight-forward really. Backing up is just the thing to do because it's always the thing to do.