No search ability.....this is insane!

My friends laptop, HPze5200, WXP SP2 Home, IE7, w/ KAV, SpyBot, SpywareBlaster, AdAware, ZA.

Laptop was infected with both adware and viruses. Remove 160 via KAV and a plethora through different anti-spyware programs. Finally got laptop running and all updated but now the silliest problem.

Have Google set as home page, when I enter something in the search box and hit "enter" nothing happens. Tried Yahoo, MSN and the same thing happens, cannot search. Perplexing. Enter key works fine in all other programs.

Uninstalled IE7, something happens in IE6. Reinstalled IE7, problem still there.

All Anti Spyware and AV come up squeaky clean.

What am I missing? Dumbfounded here. Anyone have any idea? I'll try anything. Was going to do a repair/restore as last resort.Using the method shown here http://michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm, have done it before, rather painless but the only problem is that I only have a XP Pro disc. Can't remember if it doesn't matter!

Thanks!