Hello guys. I contacted Merijn, the publisher of HijackThis!, and was told that this entry from my HJT log was probably causing the problem:
R1 - HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Int ernet
Settings,ProxyOverride = ;localhost;<local>
I ran a new log and tried to parse it and got the same results that I have been getting, so then I went back to notepad and I replaced the <> surrounding local with (), and sure enough, the log was parsed. Apparently your system was equating the <> brackets with an HTML tag, and, by replacing them with parentheses, I was able to get my log parsed.
I don't know if it is worth anything, but I just thought I'd pass it along. Thanks for all your help. I'm sure I'll be back later with more problems, because I know just enough about this computer to be able to completely screw it up at times. Which is mostly OK, because when I finally get it fixed again, it feels pretty good and I usually learn something.
