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.