Nasty Google/SL interaction!

I have a major problem which I think is Google related. The symptoms are as follows:

Attempting to access the Second Life Forums - http://forums.secondlife.com/index.php? - has become all but impossible on one of my PCs. The PC sits there for about 10 minutes showing the following status message ‘waiting for google-analytics.com...’. WTF! I mean WHAT have Google-analytics got to do with Second Life Forums?
When it finally loads, any subsequent link clicked on then takes a similar time to load, making the forum impossible to use from that PC.
In addition it’s impossible to access ANY Google related page in a reasonable time either!
However the rest of the web loads just fine. The Second Life web site loads fine, just the forums won’t.
And not being able to access ANY google content either – well, effectively that PC is now unusable on the web.

I’ve uninstalled ALL Google products (I had toolbar for Firefox, Earth and Desktop Search installed). Then removed all the google items the uninstallers left behind. Reinstalled Firefox from the web site and it’s still happening.

Oh, and Explorer behaves identically except it doesn’t display the ‘waiting for google-analytics.com...’ message.

I do hope someone can come up with some explanation for this strange behaviour. I’ve searched but only found vague references to Toolbar and Desktop Search exploits at Symantec – without any clue as to how to get out of trouble.

At present I have a pretty state of the art PC that is unusable for accessing the SL forums or any Google content and I'm having to manage on this antique!
And NO! I don't particularly want to format my system drive, reinstall XP and everything else , what I need here is a solution - HELP! Please?

strange.

Google Analytics is slow. It slows down most websites that use it, in my experience. You can always just block it entirely at the router or internet zone level, though.

As for why you can't see any google related sites, I can only suggest purging your DNS resolver cache in case something got screwed?

From the cmd prompt (Start > Run > type "cmd" and press Return), type "ipconfig /flushdns" (without the quotes)

I guess its also possible that something altered your host files?

Sounds like seriously bad spyware.

Run:

http://www.lavasoftusa.com/software/adaware/
http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html
http://www.trendmicro.com/cwshredder/
http://www.tomcoyote.org/hjt/#Top

The reason to use four scanners? they all specialize in differant areas of maelware, greyware and spyware.

then run

http://housecall.trendmicro.com/

(virus scan)

If anything comes up in these programs please put it in the forums, exactly what its named and where it says it is located...

I'll do my best to help, as will others I'm sure

Partial success Kris - thanks muchly for the help. The purge has stopped the 'waiting for google-analytics.com...' thing, though loading the forums is still glacial. Still, definitely a step in the right direction.
Going to try Cilis' range of software next.

Cheers! Already done AdAware which found nothing, I'll try the others next.

OK guys. Trend Micro's CW Shredder found nothing.

Their Anti Spyware package bleated about a faulty network configuration, asked if I wanted it fixed (sheesh! OF COURSE NOT!) restarted, and bleated about a faulty network configuration, asked if I wanted it fixed, restarted and launched a full scan.
Fired up Firefox and problem gone.
One of my onboard Ethernet connections has been disabled though, the Intel one, which I was using. I'm now on the Marvell Yukon instead. Luckily I realised this and swapped the cable.

I'm still going to run everything though, because I suspect something buggered my network configuration up for me...

Thanks to both of you for an incredibly fast and helpful response. If I do find what set this off I'll post here.

Not quite as straightforward as I thought. TMAS is bitching about the network config on startup, four restarts later it's still not happy, even though the forums and google are fine.
This needs more investigation - this evening...