I noticed a friend's computer was running slow and that she had a internet explorer. So I asked her if I could remove unwanted programs which were mainly games and other things she didn't need on her computer. It seemed to actually speed up her computer. After that I got her the Firefox browser and it worked good that day. She was surfing the internet and everything. After that day her internet went a little wacky and now she can't get on Firefox she just gets that yellow sign with the exclamation point. So I tried internet explorer again and I got an error and I don't know what it means. I snagged a picture of the error and put it as an attachments. Can anyone tell me what's going on? Or what happened? Please and thanks.

Download a copy of CCleaner and install that.

link to CCleaner (http://www.ccleaner.com/)

In CCleaner, go to Options then Advanced. Uncheck the button labeled "Only delete files in Windows Temp that are older than 48 hours". You might want to come back later and check that. Click on the "Cleaner" button on the left and run the cleaner. Delete everything that it finds.

Next, download, install, and scan the computer with Malwarebytes.

link to MalwareBytes.org (http://malwarebytes.org)

Delete the malware that is found. Reboot computer.

Delete the shortcut to Internet Explorer that she's been using.

Locate iexplore.exe. The file is almost always found in "C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer". Be careful because there may be many copies of IExplore.exe on the disk.

Launch the program by double-clicking on it. Go to TOOLS | INTERNET OPTIONS | ADVANCED and click the "Reset" button (IE 7 and 8. If you have another version, look for the Reset function). If everything works well, create a shortcut to iexplore.exe and put it where the other shortcut was.

Uninstall and reinstall FireFox

Tell her to quit going to unsafe sites and quit clicking on stuff she's not sure about.

Looks like the shortcut for internet explorer isn't pointing to the real internet explorer anymore. I once had a virus that deleted a lot of the EXE files on my system partition... is that possible? You can check C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\ and see if iexplore.exe is in there... if it is, you can create a new shortcut, but I'm thinking her computer probably caught something.

Does she have an up to date antivirus?

Make new shortcut to IE

Browse to C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\ iexplore.exe and right click and drag to desktop and choose, Create Shortcut

Thanks guys for your help, I was going to try this but now it seems it's too late. Now she can't even get passed the splash screen. So I'll see what I can do to fix it from there.

The splash screen of what? The computer itself?

the splash screen of what? the computer itself?

Actually it doesn't get to the splash. It said : <windows root>\system32\hal.dll
Was corrupt,deleted, or needed to be replaced.

Actually it doesn't get to the splash. It said : <windows root>\system32\hal.dll
was corrupt,deleted, or needed to be replaced.

The splash screen of the computer when booted.

A repair installation would need to be done - will need an XP disk for this assuming you are using XP

Repair Installation
A Repair Install will replace the system files with the files on the XP CD used for the Repair Install. It will leave your applications and settings intact, but Windows updates will need to be reapplied.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/helpandsupport/learnmore/tips/doug92.mspx