internet explorer

[bluetortoise]

hello there, it is me again now with a different question. The internet explorer on our desktop is refusing to launch for a few days now, any idea of what may be causing this? thank you very much for your assistance on this

By "refusing to launch" what do you mean? What happens if you double click on it?

What Operating System are you using (Mac, Windows XP, Windows Vista etc.)?

thanks for replying Badgers, when I click on it a page comes up to open the internet explorer and then takes ageeees to do anything else. It looks like it 'freezes' and nothing happens at all (just goes in a sort of non-responsive mode Not a very technical person myself but would love to be able to sort it out...

Can you confirm which Operating System you use? Windows? If so which version (probably XP, Vista or 7)? A Mac? Again if so which version (probably 10.4 Tiger, 10.5 Leopard, 10.6 Snow Leopard)?

Hello Badgers, sorry to take a while to get back. The OS is windows and the version is 2002, so a bit old I am afraid... hope that helps...

There isn't a Windows 2002....

Click the "Start Button", then click "Run" and enter WinVer.

What does it say?

XP? Vista? Windows 7?

it says Windows XP version 5.1 (sorry, should have said earlier that is a windows xp

hi I'm not techy but have given up on Internet Explorer and use Mozilla Firefox instead, has solved all the problems I had - same as you re freezing, or slow, hanging pages etc. It would get better then worse, and sometimes I had to turn the computer off without shutting down just to get things going again.

You could try using another browser, Firefox and Chrome are popular choices, however I'm still a bit concerned about why IE is behaving as it is. IE isn't "just" a browser (particularly older versions on older Windows), it's knotted quite deeply into how Windows works.

Do you know if you've ever updated Internet Explorer (to version 7 or perhaps 8)?

You could try downloading the latest version of Internet Explorer from Microsoft and that might fix it.

However what I'd suggest trying first is running a Malware scan to see if you've got anything lurking on your machine, the free version of MalwareBytes will do the job (www.malwarebytes.org/).

Also make sure that your anti-virus is up to date and do a full scan with that as well.

thank you so much for your help Badgers, I have run the malwarebytes and the anti-virus one (Avira) and nothing came up. I have a box that says updates need to be run (or something like that) and I have just run an Automatic Update and see if that has made any difference...

just came to say thank you for all your help with this, IE seems to be working again. I didn't updated to a different version, just run the automatic updates the computer was suggesting and that seems to have done the trick, hurraaaaaaaaayyyyy... (sorry, forgot to say thanks to Escallonia for her suggestion, I had to start using Mizilla since IE was not working properly, thanks for your contribution)