Hi,
Thanks for answering my post. The about:blank shows up when I first open internet explorer. I am able to surf to other sites but I cant change the about:blank to another web page. It keeps going back to about:blank after I change it. I also tried to have hijackthis fix the line you showed and it couldn't. At least it showed up again after hijackthis did a rescan and I also did a reboot. there was another line with the file missing that couldn't be fixed also. this line is:

"023 - service:Norton Protection Center Service(NSCService)- unknown owner - C:\Program Files\Common Files\Symantec Shared\Security Console\NSCSRVCE(file missing)"