Adnan Masood's Weblog! عدنان مسعود

I usually try to mimic the ideology of "If you’re not living on the edge, you’re taking up too much space" while our architects are mostly like "If there is no SP1 yet, no way it's going to production" so you can see the difference of opinion here.

Recently in order to follow the cutting edge philosophy, I used Windows update to download the December 2005 security updates and started having all kinds of issues. The fixes were for

• File Download Dialog Box Manipulation Vulnerability - CAN-2005-2829
• HTTPS Proxy Vulnerability - CAN-2005-2830
• COM Object Instantiation Memory Corruption Vulnerability - CAN-2005-2831
• Mismatched Document Object Model Objects Memory Corruption Vulnerability - CAN-2005-1790

But it ended up causing

• Frequent IE hang ups
• A zillion IE windows will open up and won't go away unless you close them via task manager.
• Default browser change to firefox will cause IE to redirect all requests to open FF.

And as defined on google groups

• Opening an Internet shortcut from Windows Explorer opens a blank IE window, which then hangs
• typing a URL in the "Start -> Run" dialog box opens a blank IE window, which then hangs
• Clicking the "More Information" link in the Windows Error Reporting dialog opens a blank IE window, which then hangs.
• Typing a URL in the IE address bar opens that URL in a new window.
• Opening an Internet shortcut from within IE either opens the link in a new window, or causes IE to hang.
• Right-clicking on a link and choosing "Open in new window" results in two new windows, one with the link and one blank.

As well as in Microsoft IE Blog

• Opening link from Outlook give blank page with popup-error and second page with correct info.
• Typing URL in address bar opens at least one new, blank page (sometimes more) with popup-error and another new page which loads the URL requested.

So, what fixed it? In my case a registry key change since I was running IE 7 beta 1 side by side.

Richard All of the problems I was seeing were due to a registry key created by running IE7 Beta 1 in side-by-side mode. Deleting the registry key has resolved all of the issues.

IE December Security Update – addressing scattered reports of odd browser behavior

So did I learn the lesson? nah.... Life is good at the edge.