One of my wife’s friends popped in yesterday. Seems her laptop just “went and installed IE7”. After the installation was complete, when trying to visit a web-site, IE7 would just sit there attempting to connect, displaying “Connecting…” in the solitary tab. It also consumed huge amounts of CPU time giving the impression that the machine was slow.
I know John has been lamenting about this sort of issue over here and here. And Dan was kind enough to offer his good advice elsewhere in this blog. So add-ons seemed to be the logical place to start. However, even setting the Tools -> Internet Options -> Home Page to about:blank, it’s difficult to get to the Add-ons menu in order to actually do anything with them. Of course, being the sly individual that I am, I used HijackThis to rummage around myself.
I was pleased to read this Microsoft posting that highlights a menu option that most users may not have discovered:
[scroll down and look for Toolbars that are incompatible with Internet Explorer 7]
This menu option will at least prove that your IE7 installation is working as it should. Sadly IE7’s Tools->Manage Add-ons menu item is greyed out, so you can’t simply go in and turn all the Add-ons off from here. However, you can choose Tools->Internet Options and then click on the Programs tab thus revealing the Manage Add-ons button, as the screenshots here confirm.
Armed with the knowledge that IE7 was working fine, I could now set about looking for the offending Add-on. Without beating about the bush, it turns out that it was the Norton Internet Security Add-on that was causing all the problems: disabling it forced NIS to go in search of a fix for itself, which, to my amazement, it found. It would appear that I am not alone, others are having similar problems as this post suggests.
Anyway, my wife’s friend now has a working laptop, with IE7 and NIS running happily, so all is well. YMMV
Technorati Tags: IE7, Add-ons, IE7 Connecting, No Add-ons, Norton, NIS
Thanks for this! My mum’s computer had a similar problem so my Dad just ended up rolling back to IE6. Now I can help her fix it up next time I’m visiting.
So, NIS then worked fine with IE7, even with the add-on enabled? Because when I disabled the Norton add-ons in IE7, NIS didn’t go and search for a fix.
–Matt
I so wish people would stop using Norton “security” products. Having said that, the number of support calls may drastically fall if the consumer market suddenly stopped using it.
The biggest compatibility issue was found in the fingerprint reader software. An upgrade of that fixed the remaining IE7 issues. It now seems to run a treat. I’m a happy bunny.
Symantec have announced $200M of cuts. Maybe the message is at last getting out to people and companies to find alternative security products.
IE connecting slow problem is in “add on” programes, I am running Vista with Core2Duo and 2GB RAM and it would open as if I was running a 5 year old PC. Anyway, I went to Internet Optioins > Programes > Manage Add ons and unselected 1)SSV Helper class 2)Windows Live tool search 3) Anything to do with Adobe and restarted my IE and voila, its blazin fast now. But each system is different and you may have to disable more than a combination of different addons, its trial and error, goodluck.