Question for George Hester...

[Vance Green]

George, you once said, in reply to somwone who was
having problems with IE6 running under W2K, that W2K
just wasn't designed to run IE6.

I tend to agree, having installed IE6 so .NET professional
could run here, I've had weird problems ever since, even after
uninstalling IE6 and rolling back to 5.5 SP2.

But now, I need to be able to code in .NET again, and I wonder
if I should just bite the bullet and go to XP?

Can you shed on any light on the IE6/W2K issue?

 

[Lanwench [MVP - Exchange]]

I'm not George, and I don't even play him on TV, but....

I have installed IE6 on a gazillion W2k workstations and servers alike and
don't have any problems with it. Do you have a link to anything about this
alleged incompatibility? I've never seen one - what problems are you
actually having? Someone may be able to help if you provide more info...

 

[George Hester]

Many of us refuse to install IE 6 on our systems. The real issue here is the cumulative updates for IE 6 that came out in 2003. Again Microsoft is putting out cumulative updates for IE 6 and I would be very cautious installing any of them. The only one I know of that is "not so bad" is the October 2003 cumulative update. The ones in the beginning of 2003 are killers.

Microsoft has issues with new browsers and old operating systems. I suspect the browsers that come with the operating system are safe. Now NT is version 2 so that's a dunce. You got to go to at least 5 in that. Windows 98 came with IE 4 and I think support stops at IE 6 in that one. Windows 98 SE that is. The first version may in fact stop at 5.5. Windows 95 don't even think about it.

The point of this is to show how the versions of IE as they increase can become a hassle in older operating systems. It is a result of "integrating" the browser with the Shell. The failure of IE 6 in Windows 2000 is documented. Here is one of the publically accessible issues:

http://support.microsoft.com/?scid=kb;en-us;821164

So yes I would use an operating system that comes with the .NET Framework, IE 6 and of course that stays away from cumulative updates for IE 6 from the first 6 months of 2003.

 

[Lanwench [MVP - Exchange]]

Many of us refuse to install IE 6 on our systems. The real issue
here is the cumulative updates for IE 6 that came out in 2003. Again
Microsoft is putting out cumulative updates for IE 6 and I would be
very cautious installing any of them. The only one I know of that is
"not so bad" is the October 2003 cumulative update. The ones in the
beginning of 2003 are killers.

Microsoft has issues with new browsers and old operating systems. I
suspect the browsers that come with the operating system are safe.
Now NT is version 2 so that's a dunce. You got to go to at least 5
in that. Windows 98 came with IE 4 and I think support stops at IE 6
in that one. Windows 98 SE that is. The first version may in fact
stop at 5.5. Windows 95 don't even think about it.

The point of this is to show how the versions of IE as they increase
can become a hassle in older operating systems. It is a result of
"integrating" the browser with the Shell. The failure of IE 6 in
Windows 2000 is documented. Here is one of the publically accessible
issues:

http://support.microsoft.com/?scid=kb;en-us;821164

George, thanks for the link - I haven't seen that & will bookmark. Then
again, I don't play with XML files a lot, so I just haven't run into this
myself. I have many W2k/IE6 servers & workstations out there and so far
haven't run into a single problem I could isolate to IE6....

"If you enable the Thumbnail view on your Microsoft Windows 2000-based
computer, and then you open a folder that contains XML files, Windows
Explorer stops responding (hangs) when you click an XML file. "

 

[George Hester]

Well it actually took us quite a while to isolate the issue to IE 6 (mshtml.dll) actually. We thought it might just be thumbnail view. I was adamant that it was a XML issue. But when all was said and done it is a race condition in mshtml.dll. The article you saw was the best we could come up with you know with beaurocracy and all that.

The article addresses the issue but just on the surface. Many more symptoms can result then just "hang" with this issue. The Exception failure is the one more likely. Crashing shell.

When Windows Explorer starts crashing inexplicably then this work around is a good start.

-
George Hester
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