hotmail login difficulty

i was asked to help out at one house where they were having hotmail login difficulty for the pass few days.

as i had similiar experience before, where all else seems fine but you are unable to login to hotmail, which was in fact due to virus infection. apparently, the redirection URL had been changed to a malicious URL which cannot be loaded at all. this must be the work of somekind of spyware... i dont really know how it is done. apparently, the spyware is able to detect IE active URL and changed it when it was meant for hotmail login. I couldn't solve it, simply because there is no name for such infection. if you try to search google "unable to login to hotmail", the result would be fairly wide.

for this case, before I was at the scene, I was betting that it could be due to the same thing. As i was there with Thim Loong, we tested many times login, it seems like going but the status bar kept running and running and there was no end to it. We tried using a laptop login to hotmail and it went. I observed the redirecting URL and notice that there couldn't be much big differences, the only thing is the username which was encrypted. Then I thought of software version compatibility, which is really a loop-hole to microsoft update practice. Previously, once i had trouble receiving file from another Messenger user and later found out that it is due to version incompatibility for messenger.

So, we tested windows update and found out that non of the latest update been installed by user. I think it should solve the problem and we tried. and finally, it went.

So, having difficulty login to hotmail now can be concluded with two problems.
1. Spyware infection
2. Windows update.

p/s: if you are unable to perform windows update, make sure that there is no personal firewall installed and running at the same time of updating.