Internet Explorer crashing?  Internet Explorer 7 & Internet Explorer 8 not opening?  Are you forced to close the Internet Explorer and it generates an error.

Welcome to the latest Rant edition … or speculative AND hopefully helpful information.

Today I arrived in the office to my development workstations stating that they had installed the latest High Security updates from Microsoft and that they needed a reboot.  I checked the WSUS server and noticed many IE7 security patches.  So I went ahead and rebooted. 

Low and behold … now IE won’t launch.  I couldn’t for the life of me narrow down the specific application for the first couple hours.  Combing through logs was no help, all it was telling me is that there was an app incompatibility.  “Gee” says I, “How specific they can be!” followed by other colorful information.

Here is what I found…

Though there is a reference to Roxio’s “Drive” add-on for IE it wasn’t that.  It was the Google Tool bar.  My favorite item that I actually tried to keep out of all the other add-ons.  After upgrading to IE8 (thinking Micro$oft may have somehow intentionally done this to IE7 as they want us all on IE8) to no avail (this is where it specifically pointed me to the Roxio add-on “issue” when I first ran IE8) I decided to enable component by component of the add-ons.  The component that hung, and sadly the only one, was Google’s Tool bar.  *sniff sniff*

So I removed the tool bar, went to the Tools>Internet Options>Advance tab and then I hit  the “Reset” radio button.  At this point I am now back on all the dev boxes.

What a pain in the butt!  What would be an even bigger pain … to find what specific patch caused this issue.  Now if I could only find the time to stay off a plane long enough to find that …..