Weird IE bug??

[bluemax]

I have an associate I sold my Shuttle computer to... that, of course, means I'm now free tech support.

Well, apparently to get Internet Explorer to run he has to right click and select "Open" because double-clicking with the left button "does not work". He keeps talking about "having to start over" which I presume means either reloading Internet Explorer or even rebooting. [shrug]

But web pages don't load fully and sometimes freeze. This system never behaved this way while *I* owned it...
Any suggestions?

 

[thorin]

The problem is probably between the chair and the keyboard <grin>

Is it one of those PS/2 mice on a USB dongle/genderbender? Whichever it's using, get him to try the other.

Thorin

 

[matrixdud]

Something is corrupt somewhere. It would be hard to track down and cold be caused by a number of things. It could have just happened from a drive error, from removing a dll or it could be a virus.

The easiest no-brainer fix would be to wipe the hard drive and reinstall windows (XP I hope).

The other alternative would be to uninstall/reinstall programs namely IE.

 

[bluemax]

PEBCAK most likely. He says it NEVER worked. I'll give him it IS possible... I used HIS hard drive with his old Win98SE installation and just installed all the drivers for the Shuttle system and internal components. It's entirely possible that something because unstable during this process. I could have sworn it worked fine though.... oh well.

I agree... a wipe would be the best thing. Burn all his stuff onto CD's and wiiiipe it alllll awayyyyyyyy...
But since that's not likely... I directed him to Windows Update for a newer version of IE but he can't click on the "Install" button! The inability to click links and buttons is a new one for me.... :Q

 

[matrixdud]

I've had bad results from swapping in old hard drives in to new system to be used as the boot drive. Windows is suppoed to be able to handle it but it doesn't. You might be able to get away with reinstalling Windows over top of itself, but I'd highly recommend wiping it clean. It will run faster, you'll free up space from all the unused DLLs in the windows\system folder and unbloat the registry.

 

[bluemax]

I never changed the OS or reinstalled anything other than device drivers for the motherboard and internal components. But yeah, it's gotta' be pretty messy in there.

 

[elzmaddy]

Maybe you can have him adjust the double-clicking rate in Control panel -> mouse properties to a slower speed.