BleepingComputer.com: Browsers not keeping set preferences

On this computer I use in my school's office, this past weekend, a tech guy came on and did something to the setup -- including switching to a different antivirus program, uninstalling things like 3rd part firewall (without replacing it!) and CCleaner and Malwarebytes. Anyway, these are no problem to take care of, just need to reinstall.

The strange thing is that now the browsers won't keep any of the preferences that are set. So if I set a home page, it won't stick. If I set the language of Yahoo, Google or Google News to English (rather than Vietnamese, which it will default to here where I am due to some behind-the-scenes work done by those 2 companies) and it will revert back to Vietnamese by default, disregarding the preference box I checked. I guess this is a cookie issue, but it must be in some place where all the browsers' cookies are affected, since it does the same in Firefox and IE.

I hope it's not on of these Deep Freeze type programs that the guy installed. How would I check to see if that's the case, because that would be a very debilitating setup for this computer, since it's one designated for English speaking staff, and having it set to it can't be switched to English language would mean lots of headaches every day. I could see problems like having to reinstall Flash every time you hit a flash any website that uses flash.

I just checked whether the home page I set up on Google Chrome was kept or not -- it was not, it got deleted from my Options section on reboot.

I remember now that when I started Chrome, there was a message that preferences file was corrupted.

So does anyone have an idea what I can do to fix this?

Thanks!

This post has been edited by Billermo: 08 June 2010 - 03:48 AM

Well...it seems to me that the thing to do would be to contact the designated person who changed things...and let him sort out the difficulties arising from the changes. He knows what was done and why...while anyone here would only be guessing in regard to these two important aspects of your situation.

Furthermore...if this person is the designated IT person for a series of computers within a domain...that person should be the focal point for any/all problems resulting. No one here wants to usurp responsibilities which have been previously defined in a work/school environment.

Louis

OK well, I must report that this problem went away. I rebooted again and tried to redo all the same preferences again, and this time they stuck. Not sure why that happened the first time.

I should say that the way you presume things to be here isn't anything like how it is, it's much more chaotic than that. The school is not closely managed, and the way IT is handled is that they will call in a freelance (minimum wage) IT guy from a computer shop every now and then, almost always a different guy than the last time. These guys are often not good at what they do. For example, one came in and installed 2 different AV programs on all computers (both active, but set up to never update -- go figure that out), and also DeepFreeze (which reverts everything to previous state on reboot) so that we had a completely dysfunctional AV setup that we couldn't undo. Or uninstall all browsers except for IE6 -- so leaving us with the least secure one and not allowing us to use better ones. No ability to bookmark. Things like this. There's only 3 computers here, and I think this guy was called in because the Kapersky AV had run out its subscription -- that just got replaced with AntiVir. There's almost surely no good reason for the other changes he made, other than his personal preference, a guy we'll almost surely never see again. I didn't want to overwhelm my posting with all this detail, probably I should have said LESS than I did to avoid this whole direction.

Anyway, thanks for your attention to this...

And all's well that ends well.

Bill

This post has been edited by Billermo: 09 June 2010 - 09:25 PM

Appreciate the feedback, glad it resolved itself.

I don't try to envision how each user environment may be set up...I only know that any governmental (at any level) agency typically has designated personnel to handle their IT issues, systems, etc.

As I stated, I see no point in any user attempting to use any Web forum...in a manner that infringes or obviates channnels already established within an organization...for handling IT issues. My experience is that organizations do not encourage or like this sort of thing (understandably).

Happy computing .

Louis