Browser redirected to nowhere after visiting ax.phobos.apple.com.edgesuite

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Level 1

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Browser redirected to nowhere after visiting ax.phobos.apple.com.edgesuite

Can anyone tell me if ax.phobos.apple.com.edgesuite.net is a legitimate site? According to my Kidswatch logs, my son was on this site on 10/6/08. Since then, everything he tries to do on the internet is automatically redirected to
http://images.google.com/images?q=http://www.[whatever site he is trying to access]

In other words, whatever he types is pre-pended by http://images.google.com/images?q=. I have a profile on the SAME PC, but do not have a problem with my profile - so it is profile-specific. I have searched and searched and searched for info on this problem - and I have found a few tech logs in which people mention having the problem, but none that have a resolution.

Oddly, the since the redirect prepends rather than replacing the URL, it never goes anywhere – because no such site exists. But meanwhile my son has zero access to the internet.

I have scanned the computer with McAfee, Kaspersky and MS OneCare and come up clean with all of them.

Any help is welcome!

eMachine, Windows Vista

Posted on Oct 13, 2008 12:45 PM

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Answer 1

varjak paw

Level 10

182,668 points

Oct 13, 2008 12:58 PM in response to twimom

Can anyone tell me if ax.phobos.apple.com.edgesuite.net is a legitimate site?

That's how a web-embedded reference to the iTunes Store looks, so yes, it is legitimate. It won't have any direct relationship to Google, though, so something else is going on that's prepending a link to Google Images to every URL. Have you tried just flushing the web browser's cache? If that doesn't help and your system is running Firefox, check the Add-ons and see if something like CustomizeGoogle is installed. If so, try removing it and see if that cures the problem.

Hope this helps.

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Answer 2

twimom Author

Level 1

0 points

Oct 13, 2008 1:31 PM in response to varjak paw

I followed this advice, found 2 add-ons that had last been accessed the last time my son was successfully browsing; disabled them and it appears to work fine now. Then I thought I'd try to figure out what these "add-ons" are - and the only references to the names suggest that they're legitimate although I suppose legitimate names could somehow be masking an alternate "identity". So far, so good - but I guess I'll know soon enough if I disabled something he actually uses. These are the 2 I disabled:
Name Publisher Type File
HtmlDlgSafeHelperClass Microsoft ActiveX Mshtmled.dll
XML DOM Document 3.0 Microsoft ActiveX Msxml3.dll

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Answer 3

varjak paw

Level 10

182,668 points

Oct 13, 2008 2:04 PM in response to twimom

Both of those, presuming the name of the DLL is correct, are normal components of Internet Explorer (I presume you're using IE as your web browser), so most likely they weren't the actual cause of the problem but rather disabling them blocked what was actually causing the problem. It's OK for now, but you may find that things don't work correctly with those components disabled.

The problem isn't likely to be related to iTunes, so you might want to take this question up on a web site more oriented to general Windows support. There are a number of them such as this one:

http://www.techsupportforum.com/microsoft-support/internet-explorer-forum/

but I haven't participated in any so I can't make any recommendations as to what forum would be most active and helpful.

Regards.

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