"Last night, we corrected the issue with Bing on machines running IE6," a Microsoft spokeswoman said Wednesday in an brief e-mailed reply to questions.

Starting Monday, when , IE6 users began complaining that although they had previously set other search engines as the default, searches typed into the browser were instead directed to Bing.

"Woke up this morning to discover that Bing had hijacked [my IE6 address bar search]," said a user identified as on a Google help message forum. [I] can't change it via search/customize on the IE tool bar."

"Bing seems to have hijacked many user-programmed search preferences away from Google," echoed on another help thread. "Since I didn't know what Bing was, I really thought my computer was infected with malicious software. Well, actually....it WAS. Sounds like classic Microsoft behavior."

Microsoft's spokeswoman ignored Computerworld's questions about the root cause of the problem, but one user on the Google forum explained that IE6 uses a Windows registry key to parse unknown text, such as a search phrase, that's typed into the address bar. "The problem is, Microsoft developed their URL SearchHook to do one thing: Take the unknown text from the address bar and add it to the URL http://auto.search.msn.com/response.asp?MT=text+from+addressbar&srch=4&prov=gogl&utf8," said "Kilyo" on the same thread as clmerc. "But Bing stopped acknowledging [search] provider requests."