Corrupt Cache Prevents Chrome From Opening Web Pages
by Frank McPherson Thursday, September 29, 2016

I recently started to have problems with Google Chrome where it would not load any web pages unless I was using incognito mode. The fact that it worked with incognito and not regularly provides a clue to the problem, if you understand a bit of what incognito does, but because the problem started at the same time I changed my computer's password, I was at first thinking it was caused by the password change.

The problem was most likely caused by some corruption in the cache on the hard drive of my computer that Chrome uses to store web pages. Incognito doesn't cache information, which is a big part of how it insures there is no trace of web browsing history on the computer. 

One of the first troubleshooting steps you can try is to delete all browsing history since the beginning of time by clicking Settings, History, Clear browsing data. 

Since I really was not sure what was happening, I uninstalled Chrome from the computer and at that time told it to delete all browsing data. After uninstalling Chrome I opened File Explorer and removed c:\Users\[user id]\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome. 

Finally, I re-installed Chrome, tested to confirm it was able to open web pages, and after confirming it worked I signed-in to Chrome with my Google account to synchronize my extensions.