It’s alright Wildatheart, we kind of went a little off topic. SP2 isn’t out yet, what DoS has is a release candidate thats only intended for testing purposes. The final version of SP2 is due out on the 21st. SP stands for Service Pack and they are basically just a huge release of all of the fixes for Windows. You should have SP1 if you use Windows Update. You can check by right clicking “My Computer” and going to properties. Somewhere under “System:” it should say “Service Pack 1”. If you don’t have that, then you should run Windows Update and install all of the critical updates.
About suspicious websites, with IE you should always be cautious of what you click, especially strange looking links sent to you through e-mail and IM. Even if they are from your friends. It might be helpful to disable install on demand, but its definately not a substitute for using a different browser. ActiveX is a technology by MS that IE uses, which unfortunately is the main problem. It’s flaws allow things to be run on your computer without you knowing just from visiting a website.
Firewalls and routers do help prevent some things, mostly trojans and spyware. But this is only after they’ve installed themselves onto your computer. Most firewalls don’t protect against spyware from webpages.
Anyway, what you have is a browser hijacker. You should scan with ad-aware and spybot. We were just suggesting to change browsers because browser hijackers don’t usually target browsers besides IE. And also cause IE isn’t very secure. I understand that you don’t want to change browsers. I still can’t get my brother to switch. But you should be careful what sites you visit and what programs install on your computer.