I have recently been attacked by Virus and Trojan Spyware infections. These now are all quarantined but I am unable to change my home page in Internet Explorer. When I go to "Tools - Internet Options" the section where you enter the address for the home page is faded out (grey) and I cannot do anything. Does anyone know if this is a serious problem or is it a simple thing that I am unaware of? Thanks.

You say you quarantined the threats, have you not deleted them?
Also, what programs did you use to do this?
There must still be a problem if you cannot change your homepage so maybe there is some stuff that went undetected.

Also, as a matter of course I would recommend using Firefox in place of Internet Explorer.

Sorry for the lack of detail. I have used both the McAfee Virus Scan and the Scan by the anti Spyware program Spyware Doctor 4.0. The second of these recorded 7 Trojan infections a few days ago which when present had the effect of directing me to an unwanted web page. All now is deleted. I was initially directed to an unknown web site but mangaged to get it back to my desired(Yahoo) by downloading the Yahoo Toolbar which had the effect of changing it to back to Yahoo! However the problem described above still applies and the address on the bar to change the Home page in Internet Options is faded out (grey).

As a matter of comment I have found that in spite of the claims the major anti virus programs rarely detect any Spyware yet when I run the Spyware Doctor scan mentioned above I can easily score over a dozen infections each time!

Try scanning with Ad-aware. Get the free personal edition.
Post back if you still have problems.
As a side, McAfee is generally regarded as waste of hard disk space, it's not very good at what its supposed to do :-)

Many thanks for your recommendation. This anti adware program appears to have done the trick. 120 items were Quarantined in 2 batches. They are listed under the name "Alexa". The home page is now changeable again.

I didn't think a free edition would allow you to quarantine/remove infections. Apparantly McAfee does list this threat but didn't do me much good. It is interesting to see how different anti Spyware/Adware programs catch the different problems. I think most of the rubbish ends up in the Tempory Internet Files but the most serious things get elsewhere.

Glad to hear all is well. It is genarally recommended that you use more than one anti-malware program as, like you said, different programs catch different threats.
However, it is worth mentioning that the same does not apply to anti-virus programs in which case you should only ever use one

If you have any more problems you know where to find us.