Connecting to the internet

[Rex A. Butcher]

What ho one and all,

Hope Santa brought you all your worldly desires.

For the past few days, I am having difficultly connecting to the internet. Running XP Pro and an old version of Firefox ESR (that is not the problem.) FF boots as it always has, but the first page to appear (home) now takes about 100 seconds. Once it has appeared, everything runs as it should.

I have tried in Safe Mode, but still, 100 seconds for the first page. E-mail is fine and my wife's computer is connected to the same router and she has no issues. I uninstalled FF and removed the D&S / Mozilla folder, reinstalled from the original .exe file, and before I reinstated the profile, it still took around 100 seconds for the first page..

Additionally, my home page is www.thebigproject.co.uk/original from where I frequently hit the BBC news link. This link now generates an error in connection message;none of the other links do. If I hit the BBC Sport, it goes to the page, from where clicking News takes me to the BBC news. Have no idea if this is part of the issue or not.

Ran a scan with MSE / AntiMalware / SpyBot and all appears clean.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Rex