It sounds like you have a third party program that has taken over your search engine, home page, and/or the default new tab page. Fortunately, this can be remedied easily:

1. At the top of the Firefox window, click on the Firefox button (Tools menu in Windows XP), and then click Add-ons. The Add-ons Manager tab will open.
2. In the Add-ons Manager tab, select the Extensions panel.
3. Select the toolbar you wish to remove.
4. Click the remove button.
5. Click "Restart now" if it pops up. Your tabs will be saved and restored after the restart.

After Firefox restarts, install the Search Reset Tool. This will remove the rest of the traces of this program from your Firefox.

For further information, please read Remove a toolbar that has taken over your Firefox search or home page.

Did this fix the problem? Let us know!

Jaya,

Thanks for your time.

I followed your advice (removed ALL add-ons/extensions). I was already suspicious of one of them.

I then reset Firefox.

It seemed to work. But when I restarted my PC it was back to square one, with the following entries re-appearing in about:config.

browser.newtab.url;search.ueep.com, keyword.URL;http://search.ueep.com/?q=, search.ueep.com;1370699695

I'm a bit frustrated so forgive me if the tone of my text seems a tad impatient.

when it is coming back after a restart of your computer, some external malware still seems to be active on your pc.

please run a full scan of your system with different other security tools like the free version of malwarebytes, adwcleaner, microsoft safety scanner & kaspersky security scan.

Philipp,

Thanks.

I'll do that and let you know. May be a while because it's Saturday afternoon.

You can try with "Combofix" its good for malware remover for Windows

Go to your control panel and go through all entries there. Look for browser protect or similarly named program, most likely installed when original hijack took place. It won't be in Firefox extensions nor FF reset will help. Uninstall it.

You can check for problems with preferences and rename or delete the prefs.js file and possible numbered prefs-##.js files and a possible user.js file to reset all prefs to the default value.

• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Preferences_not_saved
• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Resetting_preferences

Boot the computer in Windows Safe Mode with network support (press F8 on the boot screen) as a test to see if that helps.

You can use the MSConfig program or the Autoruns utility to see which software and services are getting started, but be careful with disabling services.

• http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963902.aspx