IE 7 woes  I've avoided upgrading to Internet Explorer 7 for a while. The only time I use the browser is for working remotely on a county site, and to download Windows updates. I tried downloading the updates with IE 6 and couldn't. I suppose it's another way for Microsoft to force behavior upon their users. Anyway, I finally downloaded the setup file and started to install it. At the start users are warned to backup their systems. I took their advice, and was glad I did.

Once I installed IE 7 I fired it up and nothing. First the program froze and I had to kill it using the Task Manager. After a while it would at least allow me to use the Tool menu to inspect the settings and I could close the program, but I couldn't navigate to any websites. Since Firefox worked fine, this wasn't so bad. However, now Google Earth wouldn't allow me to log on to their servers to use GE Plus. GE must depend on the state of IE, and now it would lock up.

I searched the web and found the sad tales of the many people who have downloaded IE 7 and and similar problems. I tried the many solutions were proposed to no avail. I tried unintalling IE 7 and installing IE 6. This didn't work because "a newer version of the browser was found". One of the common problems seems to be related to add-ons, such as search toolbars like Google Toolbar. This is from the IE 7 Release Notes:

These Release Notes give you information about installing Internet Explorer® 7 and contain information about known issues and possible workarounds for those issues... If you are having problems with Internet Explorer 7 hanging, crashing, silently closing or other bizarre behavior, an incompatible toolbar or other add-on maybe involved. The fastest way to determine if an add-on is causing the problem is to run Internet Explorer 7 with no add-ons. You can do this by going to Start, clicking All Programs, click Accessories, click System Tools and click Internet Explorer (No add-ons).

I had tried running the program without add-ons before, but dutifully tried again using the above method and it worked. And now Google Earth is working. I'm not holding my breath however. Since the upgrade many strange things have been happening, desktop icons disappearing, programs hanging for no reason, etc. I was close to formatting the disk and restoring the recent backup; it hasn't come to that yet, but I suspect the saga will continue for a while.
posted by Bruce Wright at 2:31 PM #