Sunday, April 26, 2009

IE8 crashes when visiting www.israelnationalradio.com

I was up until two o'clock in the morning solving this one.

I've had Internet Explorer 8 Beta installed on my LapTop for about a month now and was very happy with it. Last Friday I decided to do all the Windows Updates that included installing the released version of IE8.

After the reboot everything seemed fine until I went into the www.israelnationalradio.com site. BANG! IE8 crashes.

I tried resetting the IE8 and restarting but no deal. I tried uninstall / restart. Windows went back to IE7 which worked fine. I resinstalled IE8 and BANG, it crashes.

After a long Google I came across a forum discussing this issue. IE8 crashes on certain sites. I followed the posts and the Microsoft expert there was insisting that the problem was not with IE8 even though everyone told him that IE8 Beta worked just fine.

He was blaming Flash Player. I carried out his suggestions but nothing helped. Others in the forum had the same story nevertheless the expert was convinced that it must be one of the Addons like Flash that was causing the crash.

I closed the LapTop down for Shabbos, frustrated that I had not found a solution yet. On Motzei Shabbos I decided to check the forum again and there was a new post by someone calling him\herself FAST FISSION claiming to have solved the problem. He\She suggested that the problem lay with the fact that some of the anti-spyware programs insert a list of thousands of restricted sites into IE.

You'll find them under Internet Options->Security TAB->Restricted Sites->Sites button.


IE only allows you to delete one site in the list at a time so he suggested downloading a utility called "Zoned-Out" from www.funkytoad.com. There is an option in there to delete ALL Restricted Sites. I deleted all the sites from the list and then powered up IE8. www.israelnationalradio.com doesn't crash anymore.

***** UPDATE ****

I tried to install IE8 on an XP machine that had Online Armor Forewall, WinPatrol and Spybot installed. It failed to even install. disabled the Online Armor, exited from WinPatrol and uninstalled Spybot. I ran Zoned-out but the list refused to be deleted. I ended up going into the registry and deleting the entries manually. After that, IE8 installed correctly. I reenabled OnLine Armor and WinPatrol. I havn't yet tried reinstalling Spybot. I'm frightened it might screw everything up.

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