Tuesday, May 17, 2011 at 09:27
OK - bit like fixing a car sometimes - maybe worse - there is no one answer and no one path to take - especially with Internet Explorer issues. Many of these can be caused by viruses or malware you pick up inadvertently.
Assuming you have Vista or WIndows 7
1. if you have not done all the Windows updates on it (especially the Internet Explorer updates) I would start there.
2. I would probably not go past Internet Explorer 8 just yet as not everything will necessarily work with IE9 yet - so do not let it upgrade to IE9.
3. If you have done all the updates you might want to go back to the full restore and start again, or if it worked for a while after the restore and then "broke" I would look at Start / All Programs / Accessories / System Tools / System Restore where you can select a restore point prior to when it broke (restore points are BOLD dates in the calendar it gives you). If you know when it "broke" you can restore to a point prior to that (this is usually a better option than a full system restore as it can save a lot of re-installation of stuff if it works).
As one of the others pointed out it is as though a plug in or an update to a plug in has not happened properly or at all. Normally you will be prompted when you go to a page that requires a particular plug in - Adobe Flash being a common one.
Wherever you start from again, proceed step by step and try the web pages after each step so you know if it has "broken" it again. Be patient with some web pages displaying the first time as sometimes the message to install the add-in can be slow to appear. If you miss the message or manage to go past it without installing it sometimes that can lead to these situations and it does not try and install again.
Another problem can be the anti virus program you are using - and if you went back to "out of the box" and it has installed an anti virus this may be
well out of date. While we need them these days they can cause other issues - make sure that is the latest version you have, and make sure you do not inadvertently have 2 anti virus products on the same machine as they will fight each other. Even uninstall the anti virus product and do a quick
test of the pages you know are not working - or
test before you put the anti virus back on if you go back to the start again.
Sometimes we can spend so much time trying to fix a problem it is better to start again and suffer having to re-install stuff.
Ken
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