Problems Loggin On to WebCT

Some students have reported problems logging on to WebCT. It has determined that a majority of the systems with problems are running the Windows XP operating system and Internet Explorer 6.  We have also had a few reports with systems using Windows 98 and earlier versions of the Internet Explorer.

The symptoms reported include problems such as getting an error message stating that the browser sent a request that this server could not understand. Others report being prompted for an ID and password after entering the information once. Users have also reported being re-directed to an Ask Jeeves search site when trying to access WebCT.

It is believed that the main culprit of the problems is "spyware" installed on systems along with other programs. Spyware is a term used to refer to software that is installed without your knowledge to track your internet sage habits for various reasons, such as advertising. Many of the peer-to-peer file sharing programs used to share MP3s and other files on the Internet install such software. The problems have been duplicated with Bearshare, a popular file sharing program, although it may not be the only one that causes these problems.

To eradicate the problems, we recommend uninstalling Bearshare if it is installed on your system. You can do this by using the Add/Remove Programs control Panel. Just uninstalling the program does not remedy the problem because it does not uninstall the spyware.

Visit http://www.lavasoftusa.com/ and download the program called Ad Aware.  After downloading and installing the program, run it and have it search your computer system. Ask it to remove anything it finds, exit the program and reboot the computer system. Please note, this may break other Ad driven programs on the PC like Kazaa or Gator and such.

A good list of which programs contain Spyware can be found on the following web site, http://www.tom-cat.com/spybase/spylist.html. There is a good chance that if you are using any of these programs Ad Aware might break it so it will not work.

Other Notes: (Please be careful using the Windows Registry editor since damaging this file could result in other problems and cause you to re-install your operating system).

You may get an error upon rebooting referencing a file named CNBABE.DLL.  Click the OK button to dismiss the error message. After Windows finishes loading, Click Start, Run and type "regedit" (without the quotes) in the open command line and hit enter.

Once the utility starts, go to the edit menu and choose Find. Search for the filename referenced in the error. If it finds an instance of the file, press the delete key to delete the reference. Press F3 to search again. If it finds another reference, delete it too. Continue pressing F3 until it reports it cannot find any more instances. Close the program and reboot.

If you continue to have problems, please contact Academic Computing/OIT at: webct@oit.umass.edu.