A little over two weeks ago my mother in law’s computer stopped allowing her to access any https sites. Http sites were fine. Multiple solutions were tried but the only thing that allowed the connection was to do a system restore. Note that while I troubleshoot her computer for her I didn’t get told about the behavior until a couple of days after it started and thus have no idea what might have happened to cause it. Avast free version says there the system is clean.
While I was out of town over the holiday’s her system started blocking https again. Again, none of the tricks mentioned in verious places over the internet are changing anything. However this time I turned off Avast’s shields. As soon as I did this I lost the ability to access any website. Turning the shields back on allowed access to http but not https.
being able to connect to https depends on how the browser is doing it, if it’s got its own certificate store like Firefox, or doesn’t and rely on Windows ssl settings like Internet Explorer and Google Chrome.
If you’re in IE, clear the SSL state in Internet Options and see if that changes anything. See screen shot.
I got distracted in the middle of that note and never included some notes I meant to include.
System 7
Both Avast (free edition) and Malwarebytes say that the system is clean.
Norton was preinstalled (emachines) but never activated.
Windows firewall off or on has no effect.
She says there might have been a popup about antivirus prior to the first blocking of https but swears that nothing of note happened during the last couple of days.
okay so I suggest you uninstall Avast completely, reboot, and re-install it. It’s probably a module messing up with http/https traffic. ssl traffic can’t be scanned (obviously), so if there’s an attempt from any module to do it this will deny access completely to https sites.
Uninstalling Avast trashed all internet connections.
Uninstalling Norton (Norton removal tool from a flash drive) brought back all internet connections (http and https).
Thanks for the quick and helpful responses on the forum. This whole thing still leaves a bad taste in my mouth about Avast but I’m sure that the real culprit was the Norton “free trial” bloatware.