ie7 history not functioning

We've got a problem with the ie7 history. It only shows "My Computer" and no web sites. It does register when visiting ftp sites.

I posted about this to the ms newsgroup microsoft.public.internetexplorer.general and there is a long thread about it with no solution found.

I checked, (from the dos prompt) documents and settings\%user\local settings\history and saw that all the sites are listed in the index.dat (using

Code:

find  /i  "Visited:"  index.dat 

after using

Code:

 cd /d

to get to the directory).

I tried deleting the history folder which didn't help.

Updating to ie8 (beta) solved the problem but when I uninstalled it, (as suggested on the ms newsgroup), ie7 had the same problem again except that the sites visited with ie8 were in the history. A problem started happening with outlook express after the uninstall.

I had done a reinstall of win xp about a month ago and installed the sp3 before ie7.

Was thinking of reinstalling xp again.

Help appreciated.

 

Just a though, have you tried to reset ie

 

You mean by the uninstall in add/remove files? It doesn't seem to bring up the option to repair. It brings up a warning about programs that might depend on ie7 and I don't try to go further.

 

No I didn't mean that. go to the options page click on the advance tab and on the bottom of the page there is a restore and a reset tab. try the restore tab first and see if that help if not use the reset tab. that is supposed to take IE back to just installed mode...

 

Tried both restore and reset. (Had to edit the registry to get rid of the runonce.msn.com page again. Can't get the search page to change from microsoft live search also.)

The history still has the same problem.

 

I just tried uninstalling ie7. I then deleted the history folder.

The history now seems to be functioning (in ie6).

Next I was thinking of trying reinstalling ie7.

 

I reinstalled ie7 and the history is now functioning. I was also able to reset the search provider to the one I wanted, (instead of "live search").

There is still a strange problem happening with outlook express. I'm unable to post to the msnews.microsoft.com server for some reason. I get an error that says "invalid message-i.d.". I'm able to post thru the news.verizon.net server with no problem.