Hotmail HTTP Error 400

Name: Alyssa
I keep getting an ERROR 400 message on some sites i try to get to! They are very common sites like MSN and Hotmail.

I have a brand new HP laptop, Vista, Windows IE. I have no clue how to get this error message to stop! Please help!

I am using Trend Micro 2008 and Webroot Spy Sweeper Software.

More than likely, your Hotmail HTTP Error 400 is being caused by a malformed request by your computer to the web server. Most commonly this is because a software suite on your computer has privacy settings that are supposed to strip your browser requests of their referrer information, but occasionally end up stripping other vital information from the request as well.

Norton Internet Securities “Stealth Browsing Mode” causes this issue all the time.

So, the first step would be to disable your Trend Micro protection completely. Do the same with Webroot. Following this, you’ll need to check your security settings in Internet Explorer. To do this, click on Tools->Internet Options. Click on the Privacy tab, and set it to Default. Now click on the Security tab and select the Internet, Local intranet, Trusted sites, and Restricted sites icons, setting them to Default Level one at a time. Actually, since you’re running Vista which comes with IE7, you can simply click the Reset all zones to default level. That’ll be a hint quicker. Click Apply and then OK.

Close Internet Explorer and reopen it. Try to navigate to the pages that were previously giving you problems. If the issue persists, you may need to reset your DNS data as well. Click Start->Run and type CMD then press enter. When the Command Prompt opens up type ipconfig /flushDNS (this may need to be run from within the Administrator account). You’ll also want to ensure that the sites in question aren’t added to your Restricted sites list.

If the issue is still there, you will want to manually shut down the privacy components of Trend Micro and Webroot. Some suites leave their privacy settings active even if the full package itself is set as ‘disabled’. I’m not sure where the settings are in either of these anti-malware suites so you’ll have to poke around.

Once you’ve got the sites displaying, activate your security software packages one at a time. First reactivate PC-cillin, test it, and if it works then re-enable Webroot Spy Sweeper. If it stops working after either one of those has been re-enabled then you may need to uninstall and reinstall them as the privacy profiles have likely become corrupted.