Hey everyone! I’m brand new here. I made this account to share with everyone my fix, with info I think is relevant to the problem… Hopefully this is useful to you!
So my girlfriend has been fighting with her Best Buy dell laptop ever since she bought it… It’s full of random crap like “Dell This” and “Dell That” and “Real Player X, Y, Z” so there are a lot of variables here…
It’s important to note that she was using Kapersky 2012 and McAfee antiviruses. I’m pretty sure the guys at Best Buy, or rather the guys in India that actually work on the computers remotely, installed them. I uninstalled them because they are crap and installed Avast! without using any removal tools (now I know that was ill-advised).
TL;DR this paragraph: System had a bunch of junk programs on it, including Kapersky and McAfee antiviruses. Did not use removal tools to get rid of them.
After installing Avast! I realized that none of her browsers were opening. In the Task Manager, I could see they were executing and then immediately being cancelled. So I disabled all of the shields for Avast! and the browsers executed perfectly. Next, I disabled each shield individually and found that it was not, in fact, the web shield, but in my case the Behavior Shield was blocking the browsers. So I added the exclusions of c://…/chrome.exe and c://…/firefox.exe. Now they both execute without a hitch. Also, consider deleting any strange extensions in those browsers to make sure it’s not blocking their execution for a good reason…
TL;DR:
System had a bunch of junk programs on it, including Kapersky and McAfee antiviruses. Did not use removal tools to get rid of them.
Behavior Shield was blocking the browsers.
Added the exclusions for chrome.exe and firefox.exe.
Deleted strange extensions.
Success!