Problem with IE and IExplore.exe

Hi guys. I discovered a weird problem on my wife's computer last night. She is running XP Pro, with IE 6. When clicking on the blue 'e' to launch the internet explorer, the hourglass pops up for about 3 seconds, but the browser never launches. You can click the 'e' again. Same thing. But if I look in windows task manager....the machine is launching IExplorer.exe each time I click on the 'e'.....but yet the internet browser doesnt open. If you keep trying to launch it, the internet browser eventually opens, but its weird to me that sometimes it doesnt but IExplore.exe opens in task manager.

So after doing this, I may have 10 IExplore.exe apps running in task manager. And when I try to shut down the machine or log off...they system hangs up when trying to close all of them. It pops up the box telling me its trying to close and gives me the 'End Now' option.

I recently formatted and resintalled windows XP. I ran Spybot last night and found a few issues and repaired them.

I have never seen this before. Any ideas?

 

Do you have SP2 installed? I second Steve_East9's suggestion re: IE7.

 

Thanks guys. I still just have service pack 1. I thought about doing all the updates, including IE7. I just wasnt sure why this problem was happening.

 

Hi all,

I'm having a problem with internet explorer. I searched the forum archives & I found this thread to which I'm replying. Looks like it was originally posted back in January. I'm having the exact same problem as the original poster, but I don't see that he ever got a solution to the problem.

He described it well... here's what he wrote:

When clicking on the blue 'e' to launch the internet explorer, the hourglass pops up for about 3 seconds, but the browser never launches. You can click the 'e' again. Same thing. But if I look in windows task manager....the machine is launching IExplorer.exe each time I click on the 'e'.....but yet the internet browser doesnt open. If you keep trying to launch it, the internet browser eventually opens, but its weird to me that sometimes it doesnt but IExplore.exe opens in task manager.

So after doing this, I may have 10 IExplore.exe apps running in task manager. And when I try to shut down the machine or log off...they system hangs up when trying to close all of them. It pops up the box telling me its trying to close and gives me the 'End Now' option
​

Can anyone offer me some advice? I have 2 pcs that are doing the same thing - both are Win XP with SP2, and I use IE 6.0 on both. Not crazy about upgrading to IE 7 at this time, because I have programs that won't work with it, among other reasons.

Thanks,
Megan

 

Go to http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=106650 and follow the advice re: CCleaner. Let us know whether that helped.

 

Hi & thanks for responding! I'm a frequent user of ccleaner and I just ran it again at your suggestion. Didn't help.

One other thing I should mention - this problem came about on both computers soon after I ran the Malware Removal Procedures from this website. Each computer got infected about a month apart (they aren't networked) and in both instances, I successfully got rid of the problem by following the instructions on this site. I've followed those instructions on several occasions on various computers over the past few years & never had this problem until now.

Thanks...

Megan