Internet Explorer Crashing for all students WSCK32.dll

[jonnykewell1]

Hi all,

 

Having a really strange problem that seems to be spreading round the schools student machines on Windows 7. When students logon and then load Internet Explorer it stops responding straight away and the stopped responding message keeps popping up and going away over and over again. It only seems to be happening to student accounts. When I look in event log I can see that Internet explorer is crashing and it points to the module wsck32.dll which from some searching on google appears to be related to Browse Control which I am told was installed here a few years ago. When I browse to the location of c:\windows\system32 and try and find the dll it seems to be missing. Now this is what I would expect as we don't use it any more but I can't see why it's suddenly started happening. I sent our a GPO to disabled the IE add in months ago which worked as the BC-agent service is stopped on the local machines. If I load up IE with add ins disabled it still comes up with the stopped responding error.

 

I went onto the server where browse control was originally running and although still installed it's no longer running. I've uninstalled it just in case but I can't seem to fix the issue with the student machines. I checked a few machines as some were mixed versions of 10 and 11. I updated one to 11 and still the same issue. The student homepage points through to a frog server which is just used as an intranet page and logs in through NTLM, at first I thought it could be an issue loading the page but that seems to be loading ok.

 

Are there any windows updates floating about at the minute that might be causing this sort of issue? Has anybody seen it before? Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated as i'm pulling my hair out here.

 

Thanks

[themightymrp]

I collaborated with @jonnykewell1 on this and we got it resolved. There were some remnants of an old install of BrowseControl 3.3 on some of the machines. Ordinarily, not a problem, but I think a recent Windows Update did something to the winsock settings of the machine. BrowseControl hooked into that (hence the wsck32.dll file) and I think the update mashed things.

 

We were able to deploy a startup file that ran once and did a netsh winsock reset and this cured it.

 

It helps that I worked at the school previously when BrowseControl was in use so knew a little of its quirks