Justin Gollnick

Distinguished
Dec 11, 2009
2
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18,510
This seems to be a very common problem. I have internet explorer 8 on both an XP and a Vista computer. The XP computer is giving me no problems. On the Vista computer when you launch IE you get an annoying warning that goes something like this: a program on your computer has corrupted your default search provider settings for internet explorer. It then opens the manage add-ons box. I have disabled search providers and even eliminated them completely, including google which is my default. Nothing happened. When I did my websearch I found a few solutions. They all had varied results. One solution was to launch IE with no add ons. One suggested editing group policy but gpedit does not exist on Vista Home Premium. I even tried uninstalling and reinstalling IE8 and the same error occurred. All these solutions worked for some people, while I did not yield any results. The most common solution and what seemed to work for a majority of people had to do with registry settings. Now, I am not an expert at tampering with the registry but my computer skills are intermediate and I can follow directions. Here are the instructions:
1. Make sure IE8 is closed and navigate to the registry key. Start, run, & type regedit.
2. HKEY_Curent_User\Software\Windows\Currentversion\User Shell Folders
3. Add a new expandable string value inside key listed above with a value name of appdata and a value data of %userprofile%\application data.
4. Reopen IE8 and see if you still get error message.
This yielded positive results for many people. I don’t know if I did something incorrectly but it did not work for me. I came to this conclusion. IE8 is fairly new. It could have some glitches. Windows Vista causes a lot of headaches that are unnecessary. There is nothing wrong with Internet Explorer 7. It will fulfill your needs. I uninstalled IE8 and kept IE7 instead. So, if you have tried everything and still don’t know what to do, roll back to your previous version. I’m sure in good time there will be a fix for IE8

 
Solution
Why don't you use Firefox instead of IE8, and then just install an extension called ie tab, for the pages that can only be opened in internet explorer.

dunklegend

Distinguished
Apr 7, 2005
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18,590


If you download Firefox, download the following extensions:

ietab
adblock plus
all in one gestures

Just google firefox add ons.