Do i have a virus?

[Drunken Monkey]

So i was happily playing css, when i decided to find some old custom skins, so i went on fpsbanana... but zonealarm didnt like the site so i shut it down, and googled fpsbanana... apaprently its called gamebanana now... anyways the second result is a thread from a steam forum saying that it's been infected with a virus, ... okay this is last summer so i thought okay whatever... but just out of curiosity i looked in my the task manager processes thing and noticed that theres two iexplorer.exe *32 things running even though theres only one on screen :S or does it count the tab ;( im scared

 

[Rakk]

Don't worry about mutliple iexplorer.exe's, looking on this machine (my work machine, I dont use IE at home), I had 6 of them, it has two instances in my task manager when I open IE, and the number expands if I have more tabs open, and doesn't decrease til I close that instance of IE.

 

[MickyG]

Ditch IE and download Firefox 3.6

G

 

[Tom DWC]

As above, IE makes an excellent tool with which to download another browser.

 

[pengipete]

Internet Explorer runs each tab in a separate process so you'll always get one process for IE itself plus one for each open tab - open five tabs and look in Task Manager and oyu'll see six IE.exe processes running. Even a single page is run in a tab so you'll see two processes when you start IE.

In contrast, Firefox runs in a single process regardless of how many tabs are open.

Both methods have their merits - and de-merits. IE's method should mean that if you open multiple tabs and one site suffers a critical or temporary error, the other tabs will not be affected. Firefox simply keeps a log of open tabs and uses that to restore open tabs if there's a problem - because one error affects all tabs. The downside of Firefoxes method is that it restores ALL tabs -including the one that caused the crash in the first place - there's no intelligence involved. Also, the log can not be deleted by normal privacy software - an issue for some people. Internet Explorer'smethod should be more resiliant but it has major flaw - there's no way to match any particular process to any specific tab. At best, it shold give you a chance to bookmark the other pages or finish what you were doing before rebooting IE.

Of course, I can't say that you don't have malware on your PC - only that multiple IE processes is normal for that app.

Incidentally - another dedicated Firefox user here. Internet Explorer is only used for a few sites that break the rules and refuse to work with Firefox (even with IETab2 installed) - like Microsoft's own site (no suprises there)