Irritating auto-connect at startup.

[Tefler]

When I boot up my computer it has started to present me with the 'connect to the Internet' screen, interrupting the loading of the other startup programs. I have to press 'Cancel' at least 15 times before that screen goes away - which is very annoying if I want to work offline. Two questions, then: 1) why has it suddenly decided to do this (for about 4 years it hadn't!) 2) How do I stop it? I still want IE on startup, but I don't want to connect.

[shybearuk]

I'm not 100% certain about this one, but I think that setting your homepage to 'blank' should stop this, as IE won't need to connect to the Internet to download the homepage.

Have you recently changed your cache settings? I'm wondering if you've changed it so that your version of IE needs to use an updated version of your homepage each time it opens, rather than a cached version.

As I said, I may be wrong about this, so maybe one of our more technically minded contributors might be able to shed some light

[j2buttonsw]

Its an old one but a good one: run msconfig (start > run > type msconfig then OK) and untick everything but registryscan and systemtray on the Startup tab. Reboot. On Windows 2000 you will have to download the "msconfig for Windows 2000" from Microsoft and on 2000 and XP you, can untick everything.

[Tefler]

Thanks, J2buttons and Shybear. Using J2's idea, I went into startup and unchecked MSNMessenger. That seems to have done the trick. (I wasn't brave enough to uncheck the other things which I didn't recognise!) Thanks again for your help.