Long one, bear with me.

Got a weird one I'm battling with. Brother phoned the other night, YouTube was telling him that JavaScript was turned off or he didn't have the latest version of Flash Player.

He tried updating Flash but couldn't.

Took a look tonight when I was round there managed to get Flash Player to update by disabling ZoneAlarm.

However, he's still being told that JavaScript is disabled.

I think there's some ad blocking/script blocking going on somewhere. Have tested without ZoneAlarm running as I've had the pro version block legitimate stuff such as animated .GIF files when it thinks they're adverts but his version (the free one) doesn't actually have this facility.

Reset all IE (version 7) security to defaults and re-installed and when that failed installed FireFox. FireFox exhibits the same problems making me think there's a third party app causing this. If I visit YouTube there's no advert appearing on the right hand side and I'm getting the same you've got JavaScript turned off or an old version of Flash Player message.

JavaScript is not off in either browser and Flash is up to date.

So, I've disabled ZoneAlarm - problem remains.
AVG 8 (free, unless he downloaded the wrong version?) is running but does not have script or ad blocking facilities.
Ad-aware is installed but not doing live monitoring, it was running a aawservice.exe for some reason but killing it does not solve the problem.

Can't see any other security software running in processes but don't have the list of what was actually running to hand. Nothing else security related in the system tray though.

Going back Sunday, thoughts appreciated.

Private Parts