The reason for this behavior is that the system would revert back to an older version of Internet Explorer 6 that would not contain the patches applied by the Service Pack. The Windows XP Service Pack 3 updates the version of Internet Explorer installed on the system during installation of the Service Pack.

The only possible way to uninstall Internet Explorer 7 that has been installed before installing Service Pack 3 is to uninstall the Service Pack first and then Internet Explorer 7. Microsoft suggests that users of IE6 should update their system with Service Pack 3 first and install IE7 afterwards. This would ensure that the browser could be uninstalled normally.

I’m sure that not many users will run into this problem but some surely will. An alternative would be to switch to another browser like Opera or Firefox if you do not feel like uninstalling the Service Pack to uninstall IE7 is worth it.

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Internet Explorer 7 Standalone (IE7 Standalone) comes in handy if you are still running Internet Explorer 6 on your system but want to install Internet Explorer 7 as well to be able to use both browsers on your system. It’s basically a script that downloads Internet Explorer 7 directly from Microsoft and installs it as a standalone application on your computer. This means that it does not mess with Internet Explorer 6 in any way and that it is possible to load either one of them.

This method does have some shortcomings though. Some features that require Registry keys that are still occupied by Internet Explorer 6 are broken and will not work in Internet Explorer 7 standalone. The developer is listing several features that seem to be broken although most do not explain the aspect that is not working.

This is a great way to run both Internet Explorer 6 and 7 on the same system. A quick test did not reveal any difficulties so far.

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IE Surfgear to the rescue. The tiny program adds three functions accessible through buttons to the Microsoft Internet Explorer. Each button resolves on of the problems mentioned above. The first button automatically changes the font size of tiny text (and only of it, normal sized text will remain untouched) on a website to an average one, the next removes background colors of text on a website and the last removes background textures (including colors) that make text hardly readable.

The author was so nice to add a live demonstration on his website where you can try the buttons and see what they do. The buttons should be available right away after installing IE Surfgear, if they are not you have to customize the Internet Explorer toolbar to add them (or only some of them) to it.

Click on Tools > Toolbars > Customize to add the buttons to your toolbar if they are not displayed after installation.

Funny side note. I did find the link to the program at Shell Extension City which is in my opinion a hard to read website with their black background and grey text. Take a look at the before and after (using the buttons) screenshots of the website.

That’s a visible difference, don’t you think ?

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Internet Explorer 6 crashes when opening websites after upgrading Windows with the security update 942615 which was part of the December patch update of Microsoft. My personal suggestion would be to make the switch to Internet Explorer 7, Firefox or Opera and forget about this problem and be more secure at the same time.

If that is not wanted or possible at the moment you can fix the bug the following way, props to Bink for posting the solution.

1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
2. Locate and then click the following registry subkey:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\FeatureControl\
3. On the Edit menu, point to New, and then click Key.
4. Type FEATURE_PROTECT_DECOMPRESSION_FILTER_FROM_ABORT_KB942367, and then press ENTER.
5. Right-click FEATURE_PROTECT_DECOMPRESSION_FILTER_FROM_ABORT_KB942367, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
6. Type an asterisk (*), and then press ENTER.

Note The asterisk (*) represents any process name that uses the Urlmon.dll file. If you want to make this change for an individual application that uses the Urlmon.dll file, use the name of that application instead of the asterisk. For example, use Appname.exe.
7. Right-click the asterisk, and then click Modify.
8. In the Value data box, type 1, and then click OK.
9. Exit Registry Editor.

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The beginning is simple, you just download the latest version of Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer. But once you have these three installed you still have two to go, which isn’t as simple as it seems.

For Firefox you can simply get the Firefox Portable version, which can be found here (if that links stops working you can go directly to the project following this link)
Once you have unpacked the file you can then navigate to the map, and open the FirefoxPortable file (make sure you don’t have 2.x open tho)

Internet Explorer is a different story. Once you have installed Internet Explorer you’ll have to search for a Internet Explorer “portable” version. Thanks to the people at evolt.org there is an Internet Explorer 6 standalone version.

The downside to this is that (unlike with the Firefox portable version) the system still thinks the browser is Internet Explorer 7, so if you are using Conditional comments you’ll temporarly have to change the comment to Internet Explorer 7 instead of 6.

I hope this is useful to some of you, seeing how web design can already be a nightmare with all the different browsers (more specific, the mess that is called IE ;))

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