Excellent link, GG. I was going to sit and write all that stuff down.
When you reinstall Firefox, dazdaz/Cardinal Puff, I would also install 3 add-ins that wil save you much grief later:
- Adblock Plus - stops all those annoying pop-ups that clutter the screen and get in the way;
- NoScript - stops external scripts from running and taking over your machine. It's a pain at first because it blocks 100% of them, including ones you are happy to have driving your PC for you. You tell it to allow those.
- WOT (Web of Trust). Checks every site you link to, and tells you if the site is a known dodgy one. It's saved me from a few false Bank sites and the like, although I'm pretty careful anyway.
Originally Posted by
rgbrock1
For the life of me I cannot figure out how a USB modem can cause an external hard drive to misbehave nor how it could have corrupted a Firefox profile.
Something dodgy on the driver CD? Changed a driver that the USB hard drive was using to a "wrong" version?