Unable to open Internet Explorer!

Could someone please give me some advice? Any time I attempt to open Internet Explorer 7, I get an hourglass for a couple of seconds and then it just disappears. Task manager shows a process running for each time I try to open it, but I never see the gui. I've attempted to open from program files, and also the no-addons version from system tools. I've uninstalled and reinstalled and even tried reverting to IE6. I've attempted to use system restore but can't go back far enough to fix the problem. I've cleaned my registry using Registry Booster, and I've reloaded backed up versions of my registry as well. I've scanned with updated Norton and AVG anti-virus, and also Spybot Search and Destroy and these don't find anything. I'm not sure when exactly the problem started because I normally use Firefox as my browser. I'm running XP with SP3. Any advice as to a next step?

 

Hi, have you seen this article : http://support.microsoft.com/kb/318378

 

Hi, thanks for your quick reply. I've tried all the steps in the article. System file checker didn't find anything wrong. I tried to reinstall using the ie.inf file and the windows installation cd, but got the same result. It did run into an error copying iedw.exe for some reason. I'm not sure if a problem related to that file is causing my issue, but I did see that iedw.exe deals with IE crash detection. Also, when I said I completely uninstalled and reinstalled that wasn't entirely accurate. Apparently windows won't let you completely uninstall. It just reverted back to version 6. Either way, the same problem exists in both versions. Any other ideas, short of reinstalling windows?

 

Have you tried to install IE8, even it's beta stage?

 

I downloaded and installed IE8 from the microsoft site, along with all the security updates it came with, and had the same result.

 

You are right. Windows will not and you cannot completely remove Internet Explorer. It is integral with the system.
Did you ever install another browser and assign it as default? Happened to me once. Could not get IE to run. Always the other would start.Corrected by uninstalling the other after downloading IE6 again and installing it.

 

Thanks for another good idea, but unfortunately it didn't fix the problem either. I uninstalled Firefox and then reinstalled IE7 and made it the default, but had the same result. IE doesn't open but appears as a process in task manager. I'm beginning to think that I'm going to have to just reinstall windows to correct this. Any more suggestions?