If you caught last Friday’s Design View, you would have seen instructions on running IE7 as a standalone app — the alternative to replacing your faithful(?) old IE6 install. Over the weekend a number of people have reported that, although their IE7 runs fine, their IE6 install has begun behaving strangely, most commonly passing responsibility to Firefox when being passed a URL.
The good news is Jon Galloway at Microsoft’s ASP.net Weblogs has had this issue too, and has it covered.
The problem is that IE7 writes a registry key that causes IE6 to shift to an also undocumented “evil” mode, and it’s necessary to delete this registry key after running IE7 and before running IE6 with the December 05 cumulative security update.
Thankfully, the fix is fairly easy — a small batch script that removes the nasty reg key that IE7 makes, and guards against it recurring. Jon has a detailed explanation on the process here. The short versions is:
- Right-click on this link and select ‘Save Link As…’
- Save the file in your IE7 folder as ‘IE7.bat ‘.
- From now on, run this file (‘IE7.bat’) whenever you want to launch IE7.
You’ll see the batch file launches it’s own little command window — leave this open (minimized) while IE7 is runing or else it will get up to it’s old shenanigans again. You can kill it as soon as IE7 closes.
Thanks Jon.
September 2006 : As of IE7 beta 3 this solution no longer works. At the moment the only working method that I know of is Tredosoft’s downloadable app — get it here. http://tredosoft.com/IE7_standalone