I wish I’d had this free uninstaller for Windows XP when I ran into this issue.
I installed Internet Explorer 7 to see what it was like and was impressed. The tabs are a big improvement and in general I was pleased with it. Then I found out there were several web applications that I needed to use that weren’t compatible with IE7, so I uninstalled it to go back to IE6. Thus began the torturous journey I shall now describe.
Whenever I browsed to a site in IE6, it opened up a page in Firefox instead. Even if Firefox was closed it would happily open up a new instance of Firefox, then go to the site. It was as if Firefox had taken over IE and was now Firefox’s plaything. I thought maybe my machine had some sort of virus or adware that was trying to get people to use Firefox, but the likelihood of that happening just after I uninstalled IE7 was quite slim.
I shut down Firefox (disabling the FasterFox extension) thinking that might have caused something odd with IE. When I went back to IE to try browsing to a site, it produced the following error message: An attempt was made to reference a token that doesn’t exist
Then it proceeded to open not one, not two, but 56 (!) Internet Explorer windows.
55 clicks on the red X later (I realized after that I should have used the ‘Close group’ option to close all 56 at once), I tried opening another page in IE and the blasted thing fired up Firefox again. Did IE just give up the fight? Did it lose all confidence in itself? I can hear it saying, “No really, you don’t want to use me, I’m a crappy browser. Here, how about I open up the page you wanted in a far superior browser. I’ll just do a hand-off to Firefox then crawl back into my non standards-compliant hole.”
I tried the following remedies to fix the issue, but none of them worked.
- Rebooted twice
- Told IE to make itself the default browser
- Told Firefox not to check if it was the default browser (it continued to think it was)
- Edited the registry to make IE the default browser
- Disabled Firefox and made IE the default browser in Control Panel > Add or remove programs > Set Program Access and Defaults
- Uninstalled then reinstalled IE via Control Panel > Add or remove programs > Add/Remove Windows Components
- Made IE the default handler for .html and .htm file types
- Disabled all IE add-ons (Tools > Manage Add-ons)
What finally solved the problem was to reinstall IE7, which worked correctly and went to sites on its own instead of opening them up in Firefox. Then I uninstalled IE7 again, rebooted, and IE6 was back to normal. I look forward to the day when all applications work in Firefox.
