IE Not working?

I downloaded and used only firefox a long time ago, but now i cant even open up IE. i click the app, but nothing happens. i cant figure out what happened. It wouldn't kill me not to use it on this machine, but im curious.

Dave

 

Is it showing in Task Manager -> Processes?

 

no. and i tried setting the processes and defaults for it, and nothing.

 

What's your OS? On a side note, my cousin has been having this same problem for a long while and i can't find anything that works, reinstalling didn't help and Google didn't yield any answers. Because of this problem he can't receive windows updates as he is on XP which is quite a big dilemma.

 

Vista Home Premium no service pack.

if its happening now it probably happened for some time now, and it hasnt been bad yet. so if i cant get any updates, i think its not going to kill.

 

I'm pretty sure the Vista update engine runs separately from IE, so i recommend you update to Vista SP1 to see if that may alleviate the problem.

 

It sounds like a virus. Do a full system scan.

 

i dont think its a virus

have you tried cleaning your registry?

 

tried downloading and reinstalling IE7?

cheers ...

 

At bottom it sounds like there's an IE dependency that got shifted to Firefox, and not properly shifted back when you uninstalled Firefox, and IE (or some other underlying process that's triggered in the process of starting IE up) doesn't have the good graces to terminate gracefully, and instead is getting hung up somewhere, either waiting for something that will never happen, or looping. Of course, it could also be that some precursor process that would normally start IE was reset to point to Firefox, was not redirected at the time Firefox was uninstalled, and is now terminating a little too gracefully (i.e., silently without giving any sort of an error message) and thus failing to trigger IE.

In part, it might have happened if you installed Firefox either as a non-admin user, or just for the current user instead of all users, and then did the uninstallation in a different manner, which could mean that, as far as the underlying OS is concerned, Firefox is still "installed" for someone, somewhere, and so IE is looking for something it doesn't have access to (although if you installed as nonadmin user and then uninstalled as admin, I would think that the elevated privilege level would have avoided this little bugaboo).

At this point, the simplest solution is probably to make sure that Firefox is fully uninstalled, including doing a run of CCleaner and/or some other app that completely removes all traces of an old installation that's been removed. Next, you need to repair IE. Since you're using _Vista, of which I do not know much, my suggestion on this point may not be totally relevant but, for what it's worth, just downloading IE7 and installing it without repairing the underlying installation of IE would probably either not fix the problem, or potentially make it worse. I don't know if the same function exists on _Vista in the same place it exists in XP, but I would suggest going into the control panel on _Vista that is the analog to the "add/remove programs" function in XP, click on whatever they've replaced the "add/remove windows components" function in XP with on _Vista, and then first removing (if possible), rebooting, and then adding back IE. If it's not possible to remove IE, the add/remove windows components may still suffice to have the OS restore your IE components to the way they should be. From there you should be able to do an installation of IE7 if you want.

One way that you might try tracking this if you're interested is to get the Sysinternals' Process Monitor from this MS technet webpage, and then fire up process monitor and watch what happens when you trigger the shortcut to IE - keep a log in case you need to hunt down what's going awry. From that, you may be able to find the particular process or whatever that's hanging, or is simply ignoring the request to start IE.