For some months I have been using Internet Explorer 8, when I really wanted to upgrade to IE 9. But I just couldn’t! When I tried, the installation seemed to work; then my PC would reboot; and then it would come up in black and white, attempting to set “personal settings”, and would just hang.
Nothing I could do would fix this. Even if I went to the Advanced Options in IE, and tried to Reset to factory settings, this would hang too.
This evening I finally managed it. Since I never actually found a page which explained the problem, here are my thoughts.
Firstly, I usually used the 32-bit version of IE8, rather than the 64 bit version. This was on Windows 7 64-bit. The reason for this was that IE8 64-bit did not support flash, so a lot of sites did not display their content. The Flash driver for 64 bit IE8 never did arrive, as far as I can tell. But I don’t think doing the Reset on the 32-bit does any good. You need to do whatever you do on the “main” version.
Secondly … you can’t reset IE8 while it is running. This was the breakthrough. Instead, close down all your IE instances, and then do Start … Run … inetcpl.cpl. This is the Control Panel options for IE, and you can access it without IE running. I was able to do a reset to factory settings OK! Then, when I started IE8 — using the 64-bit one, you may be sure — it started normally.
Then, from the 64-bit IE8, I clicked on the IE9 icon and did the install. I closed IE8 as it ran — no reason to have it open. I also paused Kaspersky Internet Security — which notoriously interferes with a lot of things.
And … bliss! IE9 installed just fine.
At least Google should now stop nagging me about using an old version.
People who use EI should not complain, ever. Just try Firefox and everything will be fine!