Blank Urls in Internet Explorer 7 Favorites

A colleague was asking me if I knew of a problem that he experienced after he setup his new computer. He was using Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 and witnessed that some of his favorites would apparently lose the url field after a while.

The favorites were still there, the description was there as well, but the url was gone and just a blank field remained.

I was a bit puzzled because I never heard about something like that before. After searching for several minutes I found a solution. The antivirus application Antivir is apparently causing the problem and there are several fixes for this issue. The first fix is to download a patch from Microsoft which seems to fix the issue.

A second solution would be to download a fix provided by the developers of Antivir which switches the filters in Antivir to avoid the problem that urls are removed in Internet Explorer in the future. I hope I'm to help other users who have the same problems and don't know what is causing it.

Update: With two fixes for the situation, there should not be an Internet Explorer user left experiencing the blank favorite url issue. This is especially true since both Avira Antivir and Microsoft Internet Explorer have moved on ever since.

When it comes to Internet Explorer, Microsoft has released two new versions of the web browser so far, and Internet Explorer 9 is not having the same issues that IE7 had for a while.

Avira kept updating AntiVir regularly, by releasing a new version of the program on a yearly basis. It too is now way over the issue, and users should feel confident again installing and using the antivirus solution on their Windows PCs.

Update 2: If you are experiencing the issue, try updating Internet Explorer to the latest version. If you are running an Avira product, try updating the product as well to the latest version. This should fix the issue no matter what.

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