Internet Explorer ProblemsFollow

When I try to open IE, a box immediately appears that says "IE has encountered a problem and needs to close"...This first occurred a few months ago, and at that time I spent countless hours on the telephone with Gateway tech people and the conclusion which they reached was that I would have to rewrite my drive, which isn't going to happen, I have over 2000 songs and I'm not about to take the time to burn each of those CDs back onto my drive...

I have absolutely no other problems with my computer, I use netscape now, and was actually turned on to Firefox for my laptop from a thread on this forum...

Problem is more and more I've run into sites that require IE to gather information (Auto Profile Updater, Beta test, maybe the different UIs), which is a total pain in the ***, after using these other browsers, I realize that I hate IE anyway, but anyhow...

Here's a quote of what Kaolian recommended I do:


Neither of these worked, when I come to the point where I am to change the value from 1 to 0, it is already set to 0, as I already did this via the tech people at Gateway, and I downloaded IE again and have an icon for it, but still get the same message...

I really don't want to have to ship my PC to Gateway, I don't trust them, they'll end up keeping my PC for 3 weeks, rewriting my drive without telling me, and then charging me 200 bucks for it...

After reading a few of the posts here it seems as though there are quite a few of you that are very knowledgable about the subject, so I hope you can help or at least give me some alternatives to shipping it off into the unknown...

1) Rolling back to IE 5 fixes this problem instantly. The downside is that it's IE 5. You might run into some SSL issues.

2) What you're seeing is almost allways caused by a corrupt third party extention. You could try the following, assuming Kao or the guys from gateway didn't f up your registry TOO badly.

1. Click Start, Run, type Inetcpl.cpl
2. Click the Advanced tab.
3. Under Browsing, clear the Enable third-party browser extensions (requires restart) check box.
4. Restart Internet Explorer.

I'd give that a shot and see if you recover from the error. If you do, you'll still need to figure out what's causing the API to fail (which is the problem) and fix that extention if it's something you need or kill it if it's something that got installed there while you weren't lookin.

Oh yeah, Smart Tags can cause this too, but I assume no one has a build of XP or IE6 old enough to still have those on. If you still have Smart Tage, that's another thing that could be the problem. You can follow Msoft's directions to remove them:

HERE



Edited, Fri May 7 18:43:16 2004 by Smasharoo

Edited, Fri May 7 18:46:35 2004 by Smasharoo

Don't worry about the API, the simple way to explain it is that some third party extention could be causing IE to fail when you start it up.

If you get to the point where it'll start up again let me know and we'll see if we can't figure out was cuasing it to crash. If not, hey there's allways system rollback!

Or did you fix it allready?

Edited, Fri May 7 21:38:21 2004 by Smasharoo

Oh, that's good. Here's the deal in simple terms.

What happened was that someone else's third party code was crashing your browser as soon as it opened. You won't be able to run any third party code as part of IE with that chek box cleared. What sort of things are third party code browser extentions?

Google's toolbar inbed, streaming stock quotes, yahoo's toolbar, that sort of thing.

If you don't use or care about any of that stuff you can just leave the check box cleared and you'll be fine. It's likely that you have some sort of scumware browser extention causing the crash, so you might want to go through the normall sbybot/ad-aware/CWS shred/hijackthis routine to see if there's anything lurking around that you should get rid of.

You should be good to go on those sites that you need to run IE specefic code on though.

If you feel a compelling need to install a custon toolbar or somethng or have realtime weather on your toolbar or whatever let me know, otherwise you should be all set.

Edit: Oh, and it would make me happy if you posted:

BAM! SMASH FIXEDED IT!!!!



Edited, Sat May 8 02:07:25 2004 by Smasharoo