Windows 8.1 Browsers Won't Work

Need some help with this please, I don't really know what's going on.

I scanned my laptop with Sophos and removed four things that were flagged up. Their names suggested they were advertisement cookies or revenue apps for when browsing. Now neither IE nor Opera work properly. That's IE on the desktop and the start menu. I can start IE and search for something in the URL box and then I do get bing results but when the links are clicked there's no site loaded it just waits and waits for a response. Opera doesn't load to a home page or speed dial - nothing. The start menu apps work, news sport and App Store for example. I disabled Sophos firewall because it's over complicated and enabled the windows firewall instead.

Any help or advice gratefully received.

Control Panel > Internet options

Advanced hit reset

Apologies for the late reply. I tried resetting the Internet options to no avail. I have just tried opera with opera turbo enabled and it works. With some background reading using my phone I think I will reset the hosts file - is that a bad idea?

Check the ip settings of your network /wifi in network &connections settings. Or in ipconfig from cmd prompt.
mml

Internet options
connection settings
Tick auto detect and remove any other info.
Also you say you using search box and get bing results
Have you tried typing full url in address bar instead of using tool bars

Thanks for the help so far :)

I have tried shortcuts and the URL. I can type www.bing.com in and it comes up straight away, then search for something and the results are all displayed including image results but it won't navigate to the actual sites. Only bing. It's the same on IE and Opera. Opera works ok in turbo mode but there's something wrong because it freezes after a while (turbo & normal).

It's all clear in malware bytes paid version and all clear with Sophos. It's totally bollocking my nut in, frankly.

Have you tried a real search engine like google ?

i could remote on have a look if you install TeamViewer and PM me your remove code and pass

Direct download link copy and change back to http as don't think .exe links will be allowed on forum

h00p://download.teamviewer.com/download/TeamViewer_Setup_en.exe