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Missing toolbar & tab bar

Last response: in Windows XP
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XP SP3, IE8

This does not occur all the time, just occasionally and randomly

When IE8 is launched, instead of having the address bar, forward/backward/reload and homepage buttons, there is in its place a transparent rectangular space, as if the complete toolbar was removed and you are literally left with a rectangular "hole in the wall" where you can see a portion of whatever is visible behind it; the desktop or another open window.

Furthermore, when this happens, I also lose my tab bar. I can open my menu bar drop down menus, but I have no ability to right click anywhere on the toolbar area.

I am also curious to know if there is supposed to be an option to display or hide the address bar/navigation bar in the VIEW > TOOL BARS menu, like there is for the menu/favorites/status/command bars, because I have no address bar/navigation bar option, regardless of whether the browser window opens with the tool bars or not

If I close the browser & re-open it, it displays normally.

I an curious as to whether others have experienced this and if they found an answer

More about : missing toolbar tab bar

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nolan_vode said:
XP SP3, IE8

This does not occur all the time, just occasionally and randomly

When IE8 is launched, instead of having the address bar, forward/backward/reload and homepage buttons, there is in its place a transparent rectangular space, as if the complete toolbar was removed and you are literally left with a rectangular "hole in the wall" where you can see a portion of whatever is visible behind it; the desktop or another open window.

Furthermore, when this happens, I also lose my tab bar. I can open my menu bar drop down menus, but I have no ability to right click anywhere on the toolbar area.

I am also curious to know if there is supposed to be an option to display or hide the address bar/navigation bar in the VIEW > TOOL BARS menu, like there is for the menu/favorites/status/command bars, because I have no address bar/navigation bar option, regardless of whether the browser window opens with the tool bars or not

If I close the browser & re-open it, it displays normally.

I an curious as to whether others have experienced this and if they found an answer

You might have an add on / installed tool bar screwing things up. Go to internet options and Reset IE.

ksiemb said:
You might have an add on / installed tool bar screwing things up. Go to internet options and Reset IE.

I have no third party toolbars installed, and very few addons.

This is an intermittent event, so resetting would provide no immediate results.

Its not like the browser is crashing, which might have any number of explanations.

I was hoping that someone might recognize the unique symptoms.

Does anyone know of a list of problematic IE addons?

I did find an old thread elsewhere with the same behavior, but no solution offered.

I've been searching for an answer to this problem for some time. It started when I installed IE8 on three different machine, which all behave the same. Intermittently, the address bar is a blank area that shows the destop, and the tabs/fav tab/menu bar are missing, with the main window up into that area.

This is intermittent, happening about once in 5-10 launches of IE, and almost everytime it is launched from a link in an email. As I mentioned, it happens on all 3 machines, actually, come to think of it it also happens on a 4th machine, all running XP prof. with sp3, and I've only seen it since IE8. These are all different speeds and different models of various brands of hardware.

Since I tend to install much of the same software on these machines, though they are not clones at all, it could well be something I've installed, but I have no idea what. Reset does nothing for the problem.
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