Internet Explorer 9 will not open

[guitarzan]

I'm having a strange problem with a laptop with Vista and Internet Explorer 9. When I open IE, a window appears, but is empty. That is, the body of the window is white, the toolbar is empty, and I believe the titlebar is empty also. It sits there for 15 seconds or so, then disappears with no error and no "Program is not resonding" type message. Chrome works fine. No errors are thrown to the Event Log.

I installed and ran Malware Bytes, found a few things (MyWebSearch mostly). I also ran hijackthis and removed some toolbar references (Inbox toolbar i think). Rebooted and same behavior. Norton is installed (360, i think)... I disabled the real-time scanner and the firewall, but same behavior.

I should mention that at this point, I noticed that SOMETIMES I can open IE after a reboot and it is fine, I can click links and it behaves normally. Then I close IE and re-open it, and the problem comes back and stays. Or sometimes I reboot and just cannot open IE even the first time

I tried running IE with no addons, no luck. I went to advanced and reset IE to defaults, no luck. I booted in Safe Mode, and IE seemed to work fine. I created a new user account, and that also seemed to work fine (though I did not spend a lot of time... not sure if the new user account actually fixes the problem).

Short of creating a new user account and migrating everything to the new account, are there any other troubleshooting ideas I should try?

 

[linney]

As Safe Mode worked you should go the extra mile and see if you can isolate and third party program or service that might be causing the problem.

How to troubleshoot a problem by performing a clean boot in Windows Vista or in Windows 7

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/929135

950093 How to use the System Configuration utility to troubleshoot configuration errors in Windows Vista

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;950093

Fix a corrupted user profile

http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/Windows/en-US/help/769495bf-035c-4764-a538-c9b05c22001e1033.mspx

 

[guitarzan]

Thanks for the reply, linney... I tried disabling ALL startup items, rebooted and the problem persisted. No problem at all for the new user profile.

I uninstalled IE9, which reverted the machine to IE8, and that worked fine for all profiles. I then re-installed IE9, and the problem returned for this particular profile.

So, I guess I'm left with "Fix a corrupted user profile", unless the user just wants to stick with IE8. Weird problem.

 

[linney]

It certainly sounds like a Profile problem, I think that should be fixed up as a matter of course.

Try running ChkDsk to check your drive for errors. Right-click your Drive icon/ Properties/ Tools/ Error Checking. Try it first by not checking either box (this will run it in a Read-only mode) to see if it flags any hard drive or file problems. If it does, restart it by ticking both boxes, and rerun it to allow it to attempt to fix any found problems.

 

[Turkbear]

Hi,
As another point to check, be sure all that user's temporary internet files are deleted as well as all the cookies - since these are profile-specific it may explan some of that behavior.




To Paraphrase:"The Help you get is proportional to the Help you give.."

 

[guitarzan]

Turkbear: Yes, I reset internet explorer settings to defaults again last night, this time I checked the box to delete browsing history, temporary internet files, etc. STILL the exact same problem.

I also gave Combofix a go, it found nothing major and no change in behavior. Weird thing, when I looked for restore points last night, it only had 4 restore points, all from 7/31/11 (which is when I uninstalled/reinstalled IE). Would that reinstall cause older restore points to disappear??

Followed the instructions to create a new user profile, and the problem followed into the new user profile. Of course, that doesn't surprise me, as Microsoft's instructions bascically say to copy every single file from the old profile to the new profile (minus the NTUSER* files). So, I would expect the problem to follow. I am going to try again, this time just copy the Doucments, Pictures, and Music folders over, and set up iTunes on the new user profile and hope for the best. If that fails, I will re-install IE8 and prevent IE9 from auto-installing, and be done with it.

 

[cmeagan656]

...and set up iTunes on the new user profile...

Is Bonjour Services installed along with iTunes? That may be your problem.

http://www.tek-tips.com/gsearch.cfm...action=Search&pid=1726&requesttimeout=75#1255

Hope this helps.

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