How to disable Opera start-up
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blackbird71 last edited by...
Weird thing is, when I went back to autorun, I could not find any entry related to Opera for today's date. However, I did notice a pre-link(?) before the http://www.msn.com/en-gb/ page was brought up. Unfortunately I was not fast enough to note down the pre-link but it looked something like www.go-....? What I did try to do was restart and also did a proper shut down, and on all those occasions Opera did not autostart. So it made me wonder if it could be an entry in 'News' or part of Windows to autostart the MSN homepage once a day?
...There shouldn't be any kind of 'pre-linking' in Windows 8.1 unless it's somehow been messed up by one of the Windows 10 pushed-upgrade notification attempts contained in some of the Microsoft updates over the past 6 months. If you can get a better glimpse of what the 'pre-link's' domain name is at some point, it might be helpful. There can be a world of insight contained in the nature of a domain name, particularly if malware is involved.
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A Former User last edited by
@joshl
I can confirm that Autoruns 13.51 works fine on XP.
@freedom3401
I suspect that the "www.go-" link you're seeing very briefly is a "http://go.microsoft.com...." link.
They are usually used to redirect to other Microsoft pages.
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freedom3401 last edited by
I wish I could tell you guys what the problem is but it hasn't been happening since. Hopefully it stays that way. The only thing I can think of which MIGHT have resolved the issue is on the settings in Opera which lets you decide the 'start-up options' and I chose 'previous page' which was essentially nothing rather than the other two.
If I have time I'll test it and let you guys know but otherwise thanks for the help!
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freedom3401 last edited by
Ok I did jinx myself. And I saw the link.
Does it look suspicious to anyone? Or do I just have to live with it?
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A Former User last edited by
No, that's fine. As I said earlier, it's just a forwarding link, although it would normally have something else after the "fwlink".
If you look at your Windows event logs, they all contain a similar link to click on to get further information, e.g. http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
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blackbird71 last edited by
The go.microsoft.com/fwlink you noted is a Microsoft 'internal redirect' link that, by itself, merely takes one to the www.microsoft.com webpage. Such a link, as @davehawley notes, is normally accompanied with a LinkID number (such as
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkID=313611), which will take one to a specific-purposed MS webpage. The MSN 'start page' for IE, for example, is:http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=255141, and is etched into the registry. A question exists whether there is more to the link than just what you provided?The exact link you did provide isn't suspicious by itself. However, the triggering process is not normal for a non-IE browser on Windows 7 or 8.1, and indicates something abnormal has occurred. There are a variety of possible causes, though at this point, there's not enough information details to conclude exactly what. Possibilities: registry corruption, Microsoft update gone haywire, Microsoft Windows 10 "push" update gone haywire, or a Windows internal attempt to bring up a certain Microsoft information/alert page gone haywire.
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A Former User last edited by
I'd start by downloading a copy of Sysinternal's Autoruns-for-Windows (and now a Microsoft product) at: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963902.aspx It's a safe, standalone product that doesn't need installation, being run directly from its exe file, though it does need admin privileges. Does it work on XP?I believe so. I know that 12.03 did, and the current 13.51 is shown as being XP compatible on most of the freeware sites (in fact, it shows as Win2000 compatible on many of them). The MS sites don't list XP compatibility any more, regardless of whether a program has it because - well, because that's how MS does things regarding their OS versions after end-of-support. Given that the software doesn't actually 'install' but instead runs from the executable, it should be easy enough to try it out to make sure.
Well, it says
Download Autoruns and Autorunsc- is it right? Like some two things there? It should be?
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A Former User last edited by
There are two executables in the zip file that you download.
Autoruns.exe is the Windows GUI version, which is what you want.
Autorunsc.exe is a command line version, which you can use in a command prompt.
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A Former User last edited by
What's the second one for? I didn't get it.
Sorry for hijacking the thread!
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