Henri,
Thank you for the reply. Let me tell you what I'd done
since the post. I sent a note over to Microsoft Support,
and they got back to me by e-mail in 12 hrs, with a
pretty complete step-by-step e-mail trying to
troubleshoot; I'm appreciative of thier efforts (no
microsoft whiner here), but their ideas didn't work.
They asked me to send them some logs, which I've done,
and they'll get back.
Meantime, I sat and thought a bit. I had always had a
sneaking suspicion that the problem might be Java
related. We all know that M-Soft has been hamstrung by
the Sun/Java dispute, and most of us have gone thru a
Windows update re: Virtual Machine, then wandered over to
the Sun site, scratching our respective heads as to what
d/l to apply and how, since it isn't transparent how to
install and enable Sun, while disabling VM etc..Sure
there's "Set Program Access and Defaults" and the
advanced menu in IE6, but I digress...
I thought I'd see if another browser would display the
same shutdowns at specific websites, thinking that might
rule out the possibility the site itself was malformed or
something - I chose Netscape 7.1, which incidently comes
bundled with it's own Sun/Java pack. I load it up, along
with thier Java bundle, and try the sites - they work,
after a fashion - no crash and immediate shutdown of the
browser. So I think "it's IE6." I uninstall Netscape,
and while I'm in add/remove programs, I uninstall Java
too - there were now two instances there, both removed.
I fire up IE6, return to the sites giving me headaches,
and they work fine. No crash..good speed..stable. Third
party browsers enabled in Advanced IE6 menu, and since
there's no Java on my machine, just a checkmark at VM -
no option for Java at all.
But here's the gold. I hit a site a while later so I can
tweak my MTU and RWwin settings, and that site needs to
run a Java applet...applet won't display - need Java! I
decide I want to re-install Microsoft Virtual Machine
instead - not easy given I'm XP, and the courts seem to
be saying to M-Soft "run away..run away!" I find this:
http://www.virtualmachine.tk/
and d/l my current version 5.00.3810 and reinstall it on
top of my existing VM, and you can anticipate what I'm
fixing to say, yes? Perfect. Applets load, sites load,
stable as can be, throughput grand. Ran Windows Update
to be sure Microsoft didn't want to "change me back" to
Sun/Java, or patch something, per some court order. No
d/l's needed. So I'm going to get bold, and end this fat
post by saying this to those that are wondering about
those little annoyances they can't trobleshoot after
registering a handful of dll's etc - might be Java and VM
not "talking" nice to each other. I had to pick one - I
picked VM. Over and out.
