Windows 7 - IE9 opens for a split second, then immediately closes.

Thought this would be a good place to ask this...if not, feel free to point me in the right direction.

I've had this problem ever since the first betas, thinking that it would eventually work or "be fixed"--but even the release candidate and now the final has the same issue.

When I install IE9, when I go to open up the browser (32 or 64), it opens for a split second and then immediately closes. Every single time. I've never seen IE9 open on this machine.

One of my thoughts on why would be that I have two hard drives in this machine--a 60GB SSD and a 1TB HDD. I manually edited the registry entry for default install location / program files location to the E: drive, or 1TB drive, so I don't mistakenly install programs onto the SSD and clog up its limited space. For 95% of programs this has worked out just fine, including Microsoft's own Security Essentials (even though I'd love to have the option to put it on the SSD, but there's no options on where to install it).

Anyone else run into a problem like this? Is there a better solution than reverting that program files change? Now that I've had Windows running for a while I imagine changing that record will cause some...not so nice issues.

EDIT: And I just checked--IE9 is indeed installing to Program Files on the E:\ drive.

For IE crashing, you probably want to try starting it from the command line first to see if it works this way - start > run > iexplore -extoff. If so, you have an add-on causing an issue, and can disable them via autoruns.

No dice. Don't think I had any addons with IE8 anyways except maybe Bing Bar if it's still hovering around somewhere.

Hi Porkchopp...

Having exactly the same issue, and relatively the same setup... O/S on my SSD, programs on SATA, modified ProgramFilesDir in HKLM\Software\Microsoft\WindowsCurrentVersion (and associated WOW6432Node keys).

Despite IE9 being installed to your SATA drive, it still references DLLs on the O/S drive, so you just need to rename the old Internet Explorer folders within C:\Program Files (x86) and C:\Program Files\ directories, and copy or junction the associated ones from your SATA drive over.

IE9 will then start successfully.