People that have dealt with web development already know: Internet Explorer (IE) can and has been known to cause a big deal of problems, issues, annoyances, call them what you will. Aside from the rant that I could spark in myself about padding, text, etc., this post is actually for the benefit of all the IE users out there who have been experiencing fun problems with their browser. But by “fun” I mean “not fun at all.”

IE gives us several problematic issues: The browser doesn’t open. The browser opens and closes itself instantly. Or it opens and gives us the good old “Internet Explorer is not responding” error. Before you go calling all your tech support numbers to pay oodles in getting this issue fixed (i.e. a hash shop in my local area giving you “factory reset” as the only option), try out these few techniques. I cannot guarantee this will fix IE all of the time, but as a local tech, they are a few common practices that I have found to fix the browser.

We’ll start with the users who have accidentally downloaded the Service Pack for IE8. While my general advice would be not to, try this simple fix when it’s too late:

1. Open your Start menu and select the Run command (Windows+R). Type IE8 in the run dialog box. This will open up explorer (not IE, just Explorer) to a folder for IE8.
2. Find and Locate the “spuninst” folder and open it up. Inside you will find one of two things: a spuninst.exe or a spuninst.txt.
3. If you find the .exe file, simply run this and it will remove the IE8 service pack and Internet Explorer should now work (as in it will open, not open and close).
4. If you find the .txt file, your next step is to open that file in Notepad.
5. After opening it in Notepad, go to File, then Save As.
6. Save it as iefix.bat
7. Execute that batch file and all should be well as stated above.

The next fix regards the simply broken IE (you can try this on any version, not just IE8).