Message is actually "webpage isn't available"

See if you can find the IP adress? (It could be a dns-problem) Ask Whois or similar. Try connecting to that ip-adress.

Many site issues can be caused by corrupt cookies or cache.

• Clear the Cache and

• Remove Cookies
  Warning ! ! This will log you out of sites you're logged in to.

Type about:preferences<Enter> in the address bar.

• Cookies; Select Privacy. Under History, select Firefox will Use Custom Settings. Press the button on the right side called Show Cookies. Use the search bar to look for the site. Note; There may be more than one entry. Remove All of them.
• Cache; Select Advanced > Network. Across from Cached Web Content, Press Clear Now.

If there is still a problem, Start Firefox in Safe Mode {web link} While you are in safe mode;

Type about:preferences#advanced<Enter> in the address bar.

Under Advanced, Select General. Look for and turn off Use Hardware Acceleration.

Poke around safe web sites. Are there any problems?

Then restart.

There are 2 websites in particular ...

Wingspan which is a Winthrop webpage and birdnest.org which seems to be a college site, but not specifically a Winthrop webpage. She says she can't access her Winthrop email acct either, but I am not sure if that is through another website or one of the ones above.

No problem with http://birdnest.org/

Did you follow my instructions above?

My daughter told me that her Winthrop email acct is accessed through google mail. She can access google main ok but when she puts in her email ang password and it would normally redirect... it now just stops at the redirect point.

I don't have access to the computer directly. I am going to have to do everything through my daughter. I sent her the link to this forum and we will see if she can follow your instructions.

Her comuter is infected with some virus that affected Chrome and was causing pop up ads so I put Firefox on her computer rather than deal with a lengthy exorcism since she was going back to school. My brother in law had also tried to fix the popup issue and disabled stuff. My daughter says she re-enabled everything he did. I didn't think to have her try the webpages she uses at school after installing Firefox. Everything seemed to work and no popups so I thought the virus issue was at least temporarily not going to be an issue any longer

Any chance your daughter can get help from her schools computer department or information technology department?

Sounds like a multitude of issues, some not related to Firefox and some that aren't recent. At a minimum she probably needs one-on-one support, not support thru a proxy or a person in the middle who relays support information back and forth.

IMO, at this point we don't have enough information about anything to do much except make wild guesses.

As The-Edmeister said it's only guesses. First of all take care of the VIRUS. There is a lot of how to setup a mail-client at http://mailbox.winthrop.edu/mailbox-faq.htm There is also a second way to login, if that's only for staff, I don't know: https://webmail.winthrop.edu/

Last, Google's new, so called, security upgrade can make it harder to set up an IMAP/POP . There are lots of answers on that one, just search.

Make sure your daughter looks at this information. Look to the left of this response. Do you see Posted and the time under it? The time is a link. send her that link.

Run most or all of the listed malware scanners. Each works differently. If one program misses something, another may pick it up.

Sometimes a problem with Firefox may be a result of malware installed on your computer, that you may not be aware of.

You can try these free programs to scan for malware, which work with your existing antivirus software:

• Microsoft Safety Scanner
• MalwareBytes' Anti-Malware
• Anti-Rootkit Utility - TDSSKiller
• AdwCleaner (for more info, see this alternate AdwCleaner download page)
• Hitman Pro
• ESET Online Scanner

Microsoft Security Essentials is a good permanent antivirus for Windows 7/Vista/XP if you don't already have one.

Further information can be found in the Troubleshoot Firefox issues caused by malware article.

Did this fix your problems? Please report back to us!

Does this link work?

• https://www.birdnest.org/

You can remove all data stored in Firefox from a specific domain via "Forget About This Site" in the right-click context menu of an history entry ("History > Show All History" or "View > Sidebar > History") or via the about:permissions page.

Using "Forget About This Site" will remove all data stored in Firefox from that domain like bookmarks, cookies, passwords, cache, history, and exceptions, so be cautious and if you have a password or other data from that domain that you do not want to lose then make sure to backup this data or make a note.

You can't recover from this 'forget' unless you have a backup of the involved files.

It doesn't have any lasting effect, so if you revisit such a 'forgotten' website then data from that website will be saved once again.

Since the laptop is new... it seems easier for me to have her do a full restore and then add back programs and updates. I will probably have her try Firefox as her default browser instead of Chrome. Thanks for all the help :)

Does using a VPN help prevent malware pups and other scripts from installing themselves?