IE 8 and Corrupted Seaarch Settings

I'm trying to help someone solve the corrupted search settings problem in
IE8 on an XP installation. I've Googled and Googled and have uncovered
numerous "solutions" which involve editing the registry and using the group
policy editor. Needless to say, none of those solutions work in this case
and they also don't work for most other people too.

So does anyone know of a new and effective way of solving this issue?

--
Another MacOS utter cockup, I reckon - it bloody well ought to work the
way we've tried, but it seems broken.
Rowland McDonnell on Mac - October 2, 2007

Should we know what "the corrupted search settings problem" is? There's
nothing wrong with search settings on my copy of IE 8.

One of malware's many tricks is to change the default search engine and
then make it difficult to use any other search engine. Does this sound
like the problem at hand?
---
Leonard Grey
Errare humanum est

Glavin Wobbly wrote:
> I'm trying to help someone solve the corrupted search settings problem in
> IE8 on an XP installation. I've Googled and Googled and have uncovered
> numerous "solutions" which involve editing the registry and using the group
> policy editor. Needless to say, none of those solutions work in this case
> and they also don't work for most other people too.
>
> So does anyone know of a new and effective way of solving this issue?
>