Tip for June 2009

Internet Explorer 8 with Spybot Search and Destroy

If you're a current Spybot S&D user, you may notice very slow browser performance with Internet Explorer 8. Oddly, this problem only occurs in certain systems, but reportedly concerns Spybot's Immunization. I've noticed this with Spybot V1.6.2. Leave it to Microsoft to surprise us, although I imagine that Spybot may find a way to deal with it in a later release.

If you have this slowness problem with IE8 and Spybot, there are three workarounds, although I haven't heard of any solutions at this point:

	Remove Spybot Search and Destroy. Or,
	Remove and re-install Spybot but don't Immunize. Or,
	Remove Internet Explorer 8*

* I'm a little suspicious that removing Internet Explorer 8 (Add/Remove Programs with "Show Updates" checked) is not a clean process. In one case, I removed IE8, leaving IE7 (or IE6). The older version of Internet Explorer would hang during its "Connecting" phase of startup. I re-installed IE8, which seemed to settle things, but you might try re-installing your existing version again (IE7 or IE6) if you don't want IE8. At this point, I'm not convinced that IE8 is trouble-free, but if it works OK for you, fine.

If you continue to have problems with any version of Internet Explorer, two possibilities may be that your system is infected with malware, or your Windows Registry is corrupted. Registry corruption can be caused by a number of issues, including viruses/malware, problem application software, problem hardware like disk/RAM, or even by a defect in the Internet Explorer install/remove process. If you suspect that your Registry is corrupted, and the corrupted keys/data are unknown, the only sure way to correct it is to do a fresh installation of Windows ... and we all know how much fun that is.

Cheers,
Dan.