reopen last browsing session grayed out in IE

I just wrote a long post and it disappeared while trying to run that spell check on it. Very annoying.

Here, again, is my problem:

When I close IE 8 or 9 with several tabs open, and later reopen it, the option to reopen or restore the last browsing session is ALWAYS grayed out in both the menu under Tools and on the New Tab pages.

I had a nasty rootkit infection of volsnap.sys that was mostly affecting IE, which was detected and removed by ComboFix with help from MajorGeeks, just a week or two ago.

Since it was always changing the mischief it did, mostly regarding IE, I suspect that "part of it" is still on my machine.

A MS support forum led me through several steps to try to fix this, including uninstalling and reinstalling IE 9. Then they gave up and said I had to reformat my HD and reinstall my OS. I suspect that wouldn't be enough...

I really depend on this function, and have used IE for many, many years, and don't want to switch browsers. Can anyone help?

Thanks in advance,
Barb

 

Reformatting and reinstalling your OS most definitely will get rid of any nasties present on your system. If you do a clean install, as suggested, I'll be your browser's behavior returns to normal.

 

I found my answer here: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorial...pen-last-browsing-session-disable-enable.html

Downloaded a registry change. Hope it was clean! The mood I'm in, if it wasn't, I'll just throw my laptop away. hehe

Oh, and by the way, it worked. Whew.

 

Just for the record, that is not a standard feature of IE. If you had that feature with IE, you got by installing an add-on. Just thought that should be clearly stated here to avoid confusion by someone reading the thread who might draw that conclusion that this is a standard feature for IE.

 

I've always had "reopen last browsing session" since I've had the first version of IE with "tabs". Is that the feature you're saying isn't standard?

 

Ah, OK, I see what you're talking about now. IE does not show an option to Save Session upon closing, as Firefox does, and I had not used the menu command on IE's Tools menu to "Reopen last browsing session". I've been using Opera most of the time in recent months and it, by default, automatically saves the session when closing. So, with both Firefox (when the user elects to Save Session upon closing) and with Opera, the browser automatically opens the last session when the browser is started again, whereas opening a previous session in IE is done via the Tools menu after the browser is started.