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• Category: IT Blogging
• Current Mood: >_< Annoyed

There's nothing worse than when an application crashes. Especially when it's an application that works perfectly fine and then crashes when you try to close it.

My task today was to rid a PC of spyware. Before I began my removal, I was browsing around to see what problems this spyware was causing. I noticed that the PC's ability to use a search engine was hijacked, IE crashed on exit, and that the PC was using over a gig of memory resources...

Anyway, a restart of the workstation toke care of the memory issue. That's one down. Next, I ran Spybot to remove the spyware files that I suspected was the cause of the search engine hijacking. Spybot was able to find and remove over 200 spyware problems and resolved the hijacking issue. That's two and now there was one to go.

So the final step, or I should say what I thought was the final step, was to open IE and then see if it crashed on closing it. Well I have to say, it crashed like the little Microsoft product it is.

What was the cause? Perhaps more spyware? A Hijackthis run turned up some more suspicious files, but unfortunately removing them didn't resolve this issue. Maybe it was a bad install of IE7? A long and painful reinstall of IE7, WTF Microsoft, didn't resolve this issue either. IE6 on the machine however did work without issues. Now I was beginning to suspect a toolbar or plug-in causing the issue. I disabled all the plug-ins, uninstalled all the toolbars, and then... the SOB still crashes.

So what's the fix for this issue you say?

Tools > Internet Options > "Advanced" tab > "Reset..." button.

Sounds like the best way to me. Sure you'll have to reinstall all your plugins, but that'll be alot faster than running through all the shit IE has to find out which check box you have to uncheck to get it to work right. ;)

Thank you for this tip. It worked well and im no longer annoyed!! :)