Disabling AOL Parental Controls

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.