Here at the office, we inevitably end up doing some support for everybody’s home computer at one point or another. An interesting problem had us all stumped for hours, though, and I just had to share it in case anybody else ran across it.
The symptom: the computer couldn’t surf to any web sites outside of the local subnet. We tried using both Internet Explorer and Firefox to no avail – the connections simply timed out on both port 80 and port 443.
We tried using telnet at the command prompt, like “TELNET YAHOO.COM 80″ and that gave a connection timeout.
Finally, somebody stumbled across AOL Parental Controls in the add/remove programs, but somehow we were unable to uninstall it. We called AOL and got routed through one phone number after another until it got escalated high enough.
The solution is to delete the following files and reboot:
- C:\Windows\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\spcflt.sys
- C:\Windows\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\spcstb.sys
- C:\Program Files\Common Files\aol\1127593350\ee\services\ver2_0_10_16\serviceManifest.xml
Reboot, and afterwards the computer will work fine.
Ugh. I hate desktop support. I hate even HEARING it happen in the cubicle next to mine.
Do not download parental controls at any cost. Brent is absolutely right on, on how to disable this. It took me 90 minutes to take this off, with someone else’s help. This program is not worth the time and trouble.
so please tell me how to get rid of this. Thank you also for your input, it is driving me crazy because I want to get out of that program Barb
I am working WinXP and wy PC does no heve these files. What do I do?
I can’t find those files in my C drive. I tried many times with the AOL technical team to try to find and delete these files without success. I don’t know what else to try. Any suggestions?
Can anyone help me get aol parental controll off my computer?
You can take your computer to a local computer shop and they can help.
Thank You very much for this post.
Although the path to the servicemanifest file was different on the machine I was working on, I found it and now I’m browsing again.
Great find.