Desparately Need Help: IE 6.0 Lock-up

[Tom Jensen]

I have posted this message for one month on the MSN message board for IE 6.0, and also on this forum in the Windows 98 forum. No one seems to have ever encountered it, which is frustrating in and of itself. I cannot believe that a problem this repeatable and this catastrophic is isolated only to my PC. I did get a great reply from H-Pro with some details on how to clean up/speed up my machine. Theses ideas worked great, but still I have a very repeatable IE 6.0 problem. I have copied the post below. Any help will be truly appreciated!

Has ANYONE had this same problem:

"I am using IE 6.0, Windows 98 SE, Pentium II 166 MHz. I realize this may be a WWW Forum issue, but it seemed more Windows/OS-related, so I am putting it here.

Often when trying to load a page that has graphics, IE 6.0 completely locks up. The frame is still there, but the inside of the window is hollow (graphics from any previous page or program remain.)

If I click another icon down on the task bar to expand another (previously running) program such as Outlook or MS Word, then subsequently clicking on the IE icon down on the toolbar fails to expand the IE browser window.

The really frustrating thing is that I CAN'T CLOSE the browser to try again. I also cannot back out of the problem page.

To attempt to close, I right click on the browser's icon on my bottom tool bar and click "close." This does nothing.

I finally do CTRL-ALT-DEL, and click "End Task" for IE. This either does nothing, or gives me the second pop-up asking me if I want to end the running task now. I click "End Task" and the screen just goes blank. Ultimately, after waiting for several minutes and the screen never coming back, I am forced to manually power down the computer and start all over.

I often (many times daily) delete ALL off-line content (Temp Internet Files), so that isn't the problem.


Any help would be appreciated."

[PardeGT]

I've never used IE 6 but know of someone who had similar problems with 5.5. Others use IE 5.5 w/o problems. The person with the problem uninstalled 5.5 and went back to 5.1 and the problems are gone.

I would try unintalling it and then either reinstall it or install an older version.

Click here for unistall instructions.

I think you mean pentium 166, not PII as PII were 300 and higher. How much ram do you have? Maybe your system is the limiting factor.

HTH

[Alfie]

If you go to add/remove programs and click on uninstall ie 6,a window pops up asking if you wish to uninstall or repair,have you tried that already?
If the repair fails,uninstall and reinstall.
This is usually the easiest approach.

[moparacer]

I have had similar problems with IE6 on a P2 266 machine. I am also getting runtime errors and the good ol 404 file not found window that pops up out of the blue even if you have your browser closed.

[Tom Jensen]

Thanks to all for the help and ideas. I actually broke down and called Microsoft. We tried repair, but it wouldn't work. It seems there was something corrupted about the IE 6.0 initial installation.

I finally re-installed Windows 98 (w/IE 5.0) and rebuilt everything. I have upgraded to IE 5.5, but will hold off for now on IE 6.0.

BTW, the problem has been resolved, so it was something with the IE 6.0 or the installation I guess.

When it comes to downloading the latest stuff, "Be careful out there!"

[Terrorbyte]

It is always a last resort to call m/s but they sometimes do have an answer.
I know from personal experience that IE6 and W/98 seems to have a problem working together.
For anyone else with the same problem, and this goes for outlook express V6 too,
get rid of IE V6 and roll back OE, download IE 5.5 service pack 2 and roll back one version of OE, this will fix the problem.

[lckystar]

I have been having similar problem. I can stay in IE 6.0 SP1 for sometimes about 5 minutes and it suddenly locks. Can't to anything except ctrl-alt-del and wait about a minute for it to open. If I check Processes, iexplore.exe is cycling between 96-99% cpu time. Soon as I close that file, IE closes and I can immediately open it again and resume (until the next lockup). Based on above messages, I may try the repair/uninstall/reinstall route.