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HOWTO: Repair Your Vista 64-bit System After Internet Explorer 8

Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) has now been released to the public, and while it’s not enough to shift me from Firefox, I’m happy that it offers standards-compliant rendering and a useful “compatibility view”, meaning that web developers can essentially test on IE7 and IE8 without needing virtual machines. Unfortunately, when installed on 64-bit Vista (x64), it seems to have some adverse affects on other applications. Here’s how to fix this.

The problems we’ve experienced following installation of IE8 have been:

  • Windows Explorer opens folders in new windows, even if you have “Open each window in the same folder” checked;
  • “Open in new tab” doesn’t work in IE8;
  • Can’t connect to databases using SQL Management Studio Express 2008 (“Unable to cast COM object of type ‘System.__ComObject’ to interface type ‘Microsoft.VisualStudio.OLE.Interop.IServiceProvider’. Exception from HRESULT: 0×80004002 (E_NOINTERFACE)”).

The solution is pretty simple:

  1. Go to Start -> All Programs -> Accessories, right-click “Command Prompt”, and choose “Run as Administrator”.
  2. OK the user access warning dialogs.
  3. Enter “regsvr32 actxprxy.dll”.
  4. Reboot.

Sorted! No more tearing my hair out.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 1st, 2009 at 6:28 pm and is filed under ASP.NET, EasyAs123Web.com, Links, Tips, Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

11 Responses to “HOWTO: Repair Your Vista 64-bit System After Internet Explorer 8”

  1. shouldn’t that be .dLL, not .dl? I.E. 2 ll’s, not 1 (Dugg by the way)

  2. Thankyou!, I was having trouble with vista 64 since I installed IE8, I was unable to drag and drop anymore, this sorted this problem and now im back to normal!.

    Many thanks.

  3. Thanks so much for that fix. I had been googling to try to find a solution to my folders’ opening up in new windows every time. It was dead annoying. I had just installed updates today, and this mess started. I don’t even use IE. I applied your fix, and voila, no more annoying new windows. Just FYI, I have Vista 32-bit and it still managed to bugger up my system.

  4. thanx for the fix. my internet explorer had been openning additional processes and using up my whole cpu. I think this fix did it. I hope so anyway. It hasn’t done it again, yet.

  5. I guess it didn’t fix it. It just happened again. Any suggestions on my problem will be greatly appreciated. When I open internet explorer 2 extra processes start and they keep the cpu at 100% of it’s usage capacity. I have to open the task manager and close these extra processes. Even when I close the internet explorer if I look at the task manager its processes are still running. Please Help!

  6. [...] wrote an article about this problem a while back – but it seems that the fix is relevant to more than just 64-bit [...]

  7. First, 64 bit Vista is not ready for prime time, nor is 32 bit, but nobody appears to have written 64 bit drivers yet, 2 years after this latest “Millennium” fiasco. Microsoft has evidently working on only security issues for the past several years, and it shows in their apps. All effort appears to have bypassed Vista, so I hope that Windows 7 shows that some care was taken in its development. I have been working on computers since 1966, and always wonder why marketing thinks that “new” is better than “working”.

    That said, Firefox crashes a lot under Vista; gives me “can’t open that page” type of msgs. I finally went back to IE8. Then, by accident, I found that I have 2 IE8s on my system. One is 64bit, and one is plain (compat mode?). I have less problems in the plain one. I don’t know why they have 2 IE8s. Why not one good one which runs on 32bit or 64bit PCs?

  8. Internet Explorer 8 is as stable as Opera and Firefox. it does not crash a lot like IE7.

  9. anthony heathcote on August 26th, 2009 at 10:47 pm

    im running IE8 on vista ultimate 64bit with no drama like you are experiencing.only downloaded yesterday,so maybe they have fixed it.

  10. Internet Explorer 8 is so much better than the previous version of internet explorer browser. it is more stable and loads faster.

  11. Just for the record: the problem described is *not* created by IE8. It was created by your security software (read: virusscanner) which was overly eager to disallow the IE8 setup program to write some necessary lines to the registry. Because of this the system wasn’t able to register this dll and you had to do it manually.
    And you should clean your blog from spam! All the comments that have links to websites are obviously fakes!

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