IE 7 - A Strange Tale - Almost scary!

[Dshazz]

For those considering IE 7, here's an interesting story for you. As with all things tech, YMMV, but it took me by surprise.

After installing IE7 on my new rig, I started having problems with hyperlinks not working from Outlook or Thunderbird. Clicking on the embedded link once would often make the PC seem frozen until I opened the browser and THEN the link would load the page. Rebooting would fix the problem for a few minutes, but I was always able to break it again.

Being an avid Firefox fan, I thought perhaps M$ had designed IE7 to not get along so well with other browsers. So as a test, I uninstalled Firefox 2.0 (that hurt), only to find that not to be the answer.

Combing through Google led me to several possible solutions, the least of which involved verifying the URL: Hypertext Transfer Protocol (found in the File Types section of My Computer), registering a few DLL files, etc., but nothing worked.

The only thing that made me feel somewhat better was that I found tons of reports from users have very similar or identical problems to my own.

Misery loves company.

Thinking that I might have to reinstall Windows - crap, I just did that a week ago! - my last resort was to roll IE back to version 6.

...And that took care of everything.

I can't make the darn thing break now. Hyperlinks load just as smoothly as ever from within e-mail text. Even though it's through IE 6.0, it doesn't matter to me as I do my real surfing through Firefox.

Oh, and speaking of Firefox ...

I happily installed it once again just a few moments ago...

What a happy ending!

I hope this helps anyone having similar difficulties with IE 7. I know many are using it without a hitch, and that's great! But for me, it just didn't work out so well.

 

[casemods]

I would read it, but I don't want to have nightmares, anything that has to do with Internet Explorer is a bad idea

 

[fattony]

...good contribution, really...

 

[Dshazz]

Well, as much as I hate to say it, uninstalling IE 7 didn't fix the problem.

I think it has something to do with Firefox 2.0 not liking any version of IE.

Like the sands of the hourglass, so are the "Days of our Browsers."

Yes, that was bad, but I couldn't resist.

The problem continues, but I'm okay with it for now. Hopefully, a patch or something will work it out later. It's more of an annoyance than anything.

Not to hijack my own thread, but I recently gave up the quirky Jmicron driver in favor of using Intel's onboard IDE port. I never liked using Jmicron just for my IDE DVD/CD RW drive and now I'm rid of it.

Happy Thanksgiving All!

 

[Dshazz]

Update for the curious:

In a very simple and coincidental twist of fate, I believe I have found the root of the problem.

My Creative driver suite included something call DLLML.EXE that *was* automatically loaded at startup. Many Creative users have complained about this slowing down their systems. After some digging, I learned that this is a non-essential ingredient for X-Fi to work, so I simply removed it from startup. Actually, I renamed the executable to DLLML1.EXE, because I couldn't get msconfig to ignore it at startup. For whatever reason, it would load anyway.

Now, no matter what I do, I can't break hyperlink functionality. Email hyperlinks run quick as lightning, even if I have several different browsers open at once.

Gosh, I hope I didn't jinx myself by posting this. <grin>