WinDVR 5 stops working if IE 7 or 8 installed

I have used WinDVR 5 with a Plextor PX-TV402U for years, and it is very satisfactory as a DVR system. A few months ago TitanTV (the provider of the program-selecting grid) changed to a new configuration, and about that same time I found I could no longer schedule TV programs to be recorded by WinDVR 5. (See description of problem in next paragraph.) I deleted all cookies so WinDVR 5 would start with a fresh scheduling page, which cured a hiccup in WinDVR 5 scheduling in the past. But this time that did not work. Naturally I assumed the problem was Titan TV's "upgrade" but...to make a long story short...the problem turned out to be Internet Explorer 7 which had been automatically installed on my computer.

How I narrowed this down: first, several months ago when the problem first appeared, I rolled back my entire C drive using a drive image created months earlier. WinDVR 5 now worked, even with the new TitanTV configuration, so that took TitanTV off the hook. Windows immediately offered to upgrade IE, and I refused. Several months passed and WinDVR 5 worked well, as usual, producing high quality recordings.

Today I accepted Windows' insistent prompt that I install IE 8, curious to see if the problem I had with IE 7 would recur, and it happened again. So not just IE 7 but also IE8 clobbers the WinDVR 5 scheduler, at least on my hardware, which is plain vanilla Pentium, Asus MB, running WinXP. Here are the symptoms: I would click "record" and see a description of the program, I would click "record" (to schedule it for future recording) and WinDVR would start it's scripting routine and I would see a requestor saying "You did not enter an integer between 1 and 255" or words to that effect, and then the various boxes would disappear, WinDVR would still be running, but the show would NOT be scheduled. I could never get to the part where I tell WinDVR what type and quality of encoding to use.

That was the problem several months ago when IE 7 was installed, and it was the problem again today when I installed IE 8. This time I went to "add and remove software" and removed Internet Explorer, and WinDVR worked again. So the internet explorer upgrade was definitely causing the problem. Let me go check and see which version of IE Windows is saying that I have. Yup. It rolled me back to a variant of IE 6 on that computer.

The solution, then, is to install a different browser like Firefox or Chrome or Opera, if you need to do web browsing from that computer. When Windows proposes automatic updates, pick the non-automatic "advanced" or expert option that allows you to review the updates. De-select Internet Explorer 8, and check "do not ask again" so it is not installed automatically in the future. (Of course, if your hardware is susceptible to this bug and you are upgrading Windows automatically, your DVR system may have stopped working months ago when IE 7 came out!) Either way, you can continued to use WinDVR with Plextor hardware PX-TV402U if you roll Internet Explorer back to version 6. I don't think that exposes your computer to risk if you aren't using IE 6 to do general web browsing.

If somebody else knows a cure for the WinDVR problem that involves modifying IE 8 instead of removing it, please add to this thread. My DVR computer is dedicated to DVR so I don't use it for browsing (and I would install firefox or Chrome if I did) so IE 7 or 8 is not essential.

--Russ