Father in law was telling me about his PC's rather odd behaviour. Apparently his "home screen" (that is the default page his browsers open) keeps changing. He says that it changes to something similar to that set (in his case, the BBC's home page). He claims that there is an ongoing war between some hackers (which he feels are in China) and Microsoft, and this is affecting his computer and the seed of his Internet browsing experience. He says that he can reset the home page of the browser, and it is fine for a while, but it switches to something else after a while.

I did suggest he checks for viruses, and he told me that he has virus checkers. My thoughts are that if something is getting into his machine and changing his Home page (he blames the ever present Chinese threat and some conflict with Microsoft), then it's more than some browser oddity and either he's got a back door open, or a virus. Apparently it affects Chrome too - not just the ever present Internet Explorer.

So, first off - is there any credence to his claims that some conflict such as I describe could be affecting his machine? Is this something that others are experiencing? This could be BS fed to him by his service provider, which seems to be a one man band.

Assuming not, and this is a virus, I expect that he needs to scan and nope any threats, or wipe his HD and reinstall Windows and restore data from a clean backup.

I am not sure how to look for any open back doors on Windows - I assume he needs to do so something with a firewall, but I don't know how or what to look for.

Disconnect from the network is s definite in all scenarios until something concrete can be diagnosed. Just need to pass on some wisdom. He won't like it, but I expect the prognosis is not good.

Does he have the feature enabled to re-open the last tabs be viewed?

A war between the Chinese and MS? News to me, but not impossible.

More likely is that he installed some sort of toolbar with another piece of software, that keeps making its site the home page. Most software seems to have this cr*p in their loaders these days. Software writers are paid real money by an 'advertising' company to package up their software for them and suddenly you have a toolbar or other piece of crud appear with a subtle checkbox, which most people overlook et voilà they gave a new home page and a new toolbar.

I'm guessing the MS v China comes from this.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25227592

The safest, quickest and easiest option would be to wipe the drive and reinstall Windows.

I know. He seems quite keen on the idea of this “war”, and says that there are a lot of updates coming through from Microsoft almost every day. He gives me the impression that it’s not just him, but other people he knows having the same problems. He says that the internet is slower than normal.

Anyway, he seems to be running a full scan of his system, and I’ve told him to uninstall all tool bars. He did say that a few have turned up from Bing and Yahoo - but he says that they don’t seem quite right so are probably fakes. They also seem to appear at random (he tells me).

Yes - I agree - a full wipe and reinstall is likely to be in order. This is the machine he works on, and I hope he has backups that are untainted. He’s not the easiest of people to convince that he’s not right about stuff like this though. The fact that he and his friends all seem to be having similar problems is going to reinforce his image of what is gong on, and that Mac user (he really, really does not like Macs) in Essex is not up to speed on such matters.

Never get involved with old people's PC problems.

+1. I once made the mistake of doing some work for someone, and two weeks later he phoned me and started screaming about how none of the programs worked any more and if I didn't fix it straight away he'd sue me to hell and back.

It took me about 5 minutes of looking at the PC to realise that he'd decided to use it during a drinking session and, noticing that the hard drive was full, thought it would be OK to delete a few folders from the "Program Files" directory.

He didn't sue... or apologise

I’ve got my mum’s iPad to worry about, and really, this particular issue should be my brother in law’s problem. He’s more of a Windows person that I am.

It's malware.
Quite probably a proxy installed on the machine which chrome will use as well as IE.

Disable the proxy in IE settings and run malwarebytes to clean the machine

Thanks - I’ll pass that on to him.

While you're at it getting him to install LogMeIn is a useful way to allow you to remotely assist him and show you what is actually going on with the machine (done that for my parents before) you can tell him the remote assistance code over the phone and not accept any others (it's used a lot in call centre scams)