Browser Is *Slightly* Broken

  • Thread starter Thread starter Mr. Roboto
  • Start date Start date
M

Mr. Roboto

Up until 25-Mar, all was well w/ IE. Using XP Pro, patched up-to-date
from WU. No 3rd-party firewall, using Avira AntiVirus Classic and
Windows Defender.

The browser launches and apparently displays sites normally, until one
looks closely. A visit to my bank's website was the 1st indication
something was wrong. The text fields used for login didn't render.
No blank spot on the page, they simply didn't show up ! Checking out
a Microsoft site:

(http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb457078.aspx)

The framework of the web page displayed, but the actual content did
*not* display. Print Preview of any page displays a blank page that
has all of the normal page controls, but is completely unresponsive
and can only be closed. Once I realized something was really wrong, I
tried to go back to a System Restore checkpoint from a couple of days
ago and got some really bad news. The program starts, but the content
of the window is never rendered. Apparently, that too relies on IE,
which is now broken, therefore System Restore is now completely
useless !

Remedy #1, System Restore, no joy. Actually, never attempted.

Remedy #2, reloading IE from IE.INF file, no joy.

Remedy #3, reinstalling SP2, no joy.

Remedy #4, use HijackPro to find IE miscreants. No joy. Nothing
unusual found.

Remedy #5, installed IE7, no joy. Rendering is still broken ! Can't
do a System Restore !

I'm left w/ a single remedy: a fresh install of XP ! I'm in no rush
to do that and probably wouldn't be writing this message, if my backup
PC hadn't gone down a couple of weeks ago. But even w/ Firefox and
Opera on this PC, there are a few things I routinely do that
absolutely require a fully-functional IE ! (Can anyone spell System
Restore ?) I don't use SR that often, but every once and a while,
it's essential.

I doubt that anyone can help, but on the off-chance that someone might
have encountered a similar issue and resolved it, I submit this
message for your consideration. Thanx for your time. Later.

:-- MR --:
 
Hi,
If you're back to IE6, download and run ie-rereg fromhttp://iefaq.info/index.php?action=artikel&cat=24&id=31&artlang=en

Have you cleared History and Temporary Internet Files?

Does the situation improve if you go to Internet Options> Advanced>
Browsing> uncheck "Enable third-party browser extensions?"

Hope this helps,
Don
[MS MVP- IE]
Click to expand...

Don:

This story had an unfortunate ending. I found a copy of ERD Commander
on a WinPE disc I
had and ERDC 2003 started to do the System Restore, when the program
abruptly crashed,
leaving my system in a completely unusable state ! Had I seen your
posting, I mite've tried
that first. The biggest casualty was my collection of IE Favs, a few
of which are priceless (and
*of course* not backed up), otherwise I have an Unattended XP
installer disc that had me
operational again in no time.

Thanx anyway.

PS: Two weeks ago, I repaired a Dell Inspiron 531 (the pizza box),
which basically needed
the Vista bootstrap to be redone. I'm not sure if this was MSOFT or
Dell, but yet again, in
order to fix something so simple, I needed to go GUI, rather than
launch a simple text-based
environment to run a very simple command. The entire operation took
at least ten mins on
a fast PC.

Years into this Win32/NT process, people simply don't understand that
*repairs* and
*maintenance* should not be buried under tens of megabytes of complex
software !

:-- MR --:
 
Hi,
If you're back to IE6, download and run ie-rereg fromhttp://iefaq.info/index.php?action=artikel&cat=24&id=31&artlang=en

Have you cleared History and Temporary Internet Files?

Does the situation improve if you go to Internet Options> Advanced>
Browsing> uncheck "Enable third-party browser extensions?"

Hope this helps,
Don
[MS MVP- IE]
Click to expand...

PPS: Special thanx for the pointer to the ie-rereg script. That's
going right into my toolkit.

:-- MR --:
 
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