UNSOLVED
Internet Explorer won't run
My friend just bought a new laptop (a Toshiba from Circuit City) yesterday with Vista Home Premium. He'd already started playing with it a bit and installed some things, but he wanted me to help him clean things up. So I went over and properly set up his router, uninstalled as much junk as he'd let me (he likes his AOL...), updated windows, etc.
Then I went to open up Internet Explorer...and an error pops up - "A problem occured while attempting to run this application. Windows will inform you if a solution is found" - or something like that. I'm still not incredibly familiar with Vista (only played a little with RC1&2), but I managed to figure out it would run, but only if I manually ran it as administrator. My friend then informed me that it had been doing this all along "but AOL works great." AOL does work fine, and so does Firefox. Windows and Windows Defender updates didn't have a problem downloading and installing, and they're all current now, but that didn't help.
Anyone have any suggestions?
- You can't uninstall it, it's operating system-dependent. Either contact Circuit City for the OS discs and reinstall it or return the thing for a new one. Also, check what exactly it was that you uninstalled. I bet you $50 that atleast one of the things you uninstalled might have contributed to the error. Also, whatever you do, don't uninstall some programs such as Windows Media Player or the built-in email clients or you will screw up the system for sure.
- Thanks guys.I tried finding some way to uninstall/reinstall IE, but no dice. It really does seem impossible, at least without a regular OS disc anyway.The problem probably does have something to do with something I uninstalled. I only got rid of trial stuff mostly, though. Nothing major like Windows Media Player. McAfee and the Office 2007 trial were the only major things.I would never use system restore. That's just asking for trouble.Toshiba includes a two disc recovery solution, and my friend's doing that right now. Unfortunately, there's no way to install a clean OS which is what I'd really like to do. Apparently with practically everyone but Dell it's either all or nothing.If the problem happens again I'll tell him to just return or exchange it. I'd warned him of Toshiba's support, and I tried to get him to buy from Dell or HP to begin with, but he's just too impatient.It's a good laptop, though. Nice specs and very pretty...
- So the problem was finally solved after a third system restore. Turns out the problem was a driver my friend manually installed for his new Canon printer. More specifically, he was installing an XP driver without running it in compatability mode. Once installed, Internet Explorer stopped working.
robertc123
240 Posts
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Posted February 17th, 2007 16:00