IE6 crashes on certain sites, also on closing new window

[Portland Pete]

Running XP Home SP2, Pentium4, 1 gig RAM, acres of HD space. Since
installing SP2, IE 6 fails when accessing sites that opened OK before.
Symptoms are that after a few seconds, IE just closes--no message,
nothing. Some sites will exhibit this behavior one time, then open OK
the next.
Pop-up blocker is on, also running AdWatch, AdSubtract, Microsoft
Antispyware, ZoneAlarm 5.5, and Spyware Doctor. Turning these off
together or separately doesn't help.
Second problem: recently, IE is crashing with the "needs to close" box
on closing a new window. Sometimes it will go for some time before
doing this, other times it will only allow opening and closing a couple
of new windows before crashing again.
Have run sfc /scannow, and reran the SP2 install disk to no avail.
Any suggestions appreciated...
Portland Pete

 

[Kathi S.]

Running XP Home SP2, Pentium4, 1 gig RAM, acres of HD space. Since
installing SP2, IE 6 fails when accessing sites that opened OK before.
Symptoms are that after a few seconds, IE just closes--no message,
nothing. Some sites will exhibit this behavior one time, then open OK
the next.
Pop-up blocker is on, also running AdWatch, AdSubtract, Microsoft
Antispyware, ZoneAlarm 5.5, and Spyware Doctor. Turning these off
together or separately doesn't help.
Second problem: recently, IE is crashing with the "needs to close" box
on closing a new window. Sometimes it will go for some time before
doing this, other times it will only allow opening and closing a couple
of new windows before crashing again.
Have run sfc /scannow, and reran the SP2 install disk to no avail.
Any suggestions appreciated...
Portland Pete

FWIW, I had the same problem and tried all sorts of suggestions, none
of which worked. The only thing that did work was to completely turn
off ADWatch -- voila, problem disappeared. Just to make sure I turned
AW back on and the problem recurred. I haven't yet asked customer
support at Lavasoft about this but when I do I'll post their answer
here if anyone is interested.

Kathi

 

[Ramesh, MS-MVP]

Hi Pete,

I'd try eliminating the browser extensions, BHO, and other plugins one at a
time to isolate the problem. Windows XP SP2 has the Manage Add-ons feature,
using which you can disable certain Add-ons selectively.

You'd be interested in using my program ToolbarCop to disable the IE add-ons
(that includes browser extensions, toolbars, additional buttons to the
standard toolbar, Browser Helper Objects) selectively, to isolate the
problem. ToolbarCop can be downloaded from:
http://www.majorgeeks.com/download4126.html