After installing several software packages on a new Vista PC, Internet Explorer started crashing every time an IE window was closed.
Unfortunately, I’d just installed many different packages and made a lot of changes, so it wasn’t easy to work out what could be causing it.
To make matters worse, I had changed the browser configuration and installed a LAN printer driver.
So for the next 2 days, I persevered with it. Then I switched to Firefox and made it my default browser. There wasn’t a problem with Firefox. But some things work better in IE, so there were times I really needed it. I discovered that, not only did it crash when I closed a browser, it would sometimes take other open IE windows down with it.
A search for information about Internet Eexplorer crashing didn’t turn up anything useful, so I thought it must just be something I did.
After putting up with it’s weird action for several more days, I decided I had to get to the bottom of the problem, because it was wasting time.
First I removed all the toolbars, but that had no effect. Then I noticed there were new, very small items on the standard IE toolbar – Yahoo Services, Skype, and Research.
I had already been through all of the standard menus and noticed there were some new options, so when I saw those buttons, I went straight to Tools->Manage Add-ons and then “Enable or disable add-ons.” There, I found two Skype entries and disabled them, saved the settings and closed the browser. It crashed, as I expected it would, restarted it, closed it again and thankfully, it didn’t crash.
So I tried that several times, and each time, it was perfect – back to normal. Then I searched for “Skype crashes IE7.” It seems I wasn’t the only one experiencing this problem – there were 23,000 results – but I had to have known it was Skype causing it to have found that information.
This problem has been around for a long time. I see complaints in forums when Skype was version 3.0 – mine is 3.6. You just can’t trust programmers – and I should know!
Life is good again, now I can get my Google toolbar back. I’m happy now, except that I wasted so much time over a small problem.
