A friend of mine has a problem on her Windows XP laptop. When viewing some webpages the images are missing.
It happens with Internet Explorer, Mozilla and Firefox. Looking at the HTML the <img> tag has been completely removed. On various websites some pages are fine with all images appearing properly but on other pages on the same sites none will appear. Hitting refresh changes nothing - those that do appear once always appear, those that don't appear never do. There is nothing about the HTML that differs from those pages that work to those that don't, e.g. relative or absolute paths in the IMG tag's SRC field. It effects all image types (.GIF, .JPG, .PNG).
I suspected Norton Antivirus was applying some inline modification on the HTTP traffic, but I've tried turning it off and telling it not to start at boot time but the problem persists.
This happened before and after the subsequent installation of XP SP2. NAV reports all clear. I've searched on Google and more specifically in Symantec's exploits/virus/vulnerabilities database, but found nothing.
I haven't tried Hijack This or similar (yet) because I don't have the machine in front of me. My friend is unlikely to have deliberately downloaded and installed any software and does apply Windows Updates, but might have been vulnerable to any exploits before they're patched.
Any suggestions (other than buy a Mac, which was my first one)?