IE 8 & 9 crash when opening a new tab

I've been testing IE 9 Beta, like it very much. A few days ago, after a restart, it started to act strange.

As long as I only have one tab open, it behaves normally. All menus work, can go back to last page, write addresses on address bar i.e. totally normal behavior. Only noticeable change is that when links earlier opened in a new tab, they now open in a new window. I can still open a link in a new tab from right click context menu. I can also close IE normally as long I only have one tab.

But if I click the new tab button, I'm screwed After that, I can still surf the first tab I had open, click links on that page and so on, but all menus, favorite bar and address bar are disabled. Also back and next buttons are disabled, I can only go back to the last page from context menu. Close, minimize and maximize/restore buttons are disabled. Right clicking IE in Taskbar and choosing Close only gives audio signal, one beep. Only way to close is from Task Manager, where at this point always is at least four or five iexplore processes. Ending processes one by one causes IE to show "This tab has been recovered" message, and after the last process is ended the IE finally closes.

What I have tried:
- reset IE9, no effect
- sfc /scannow, no effect
- uninstall IE9, return to IE8 > the issue stays
- run sfc /scannow after reverting to IE8, no effect
- reinstall IE9, the problem's still there

Please, all ideas welcome.

Kari

Not sure where to even start...
did you get this update initially?

I do not see that update on my update history.

So what's the overall goal here?...

Figure out how things borked?
Get 8 back to proper form?
Get 9 back to proper form?

Get either IE8 or IE9 to work. At the moment they are unusable because limited only to one tab.

If I read right, you have 9 back on? Want to see if that update does anything for stability?

If it doesn't, only thing I could try would be to remove both 9 and 8 and, reinstall 8. I'll keep pokin around for something.

edit:
have you tried running either in no-addon mode?
anything in event viewer for appcrash?

The issue exists also when running without add-ons. No IE related entries in Event Viewer. At the moment back in IE8, not reinstalled IE9.

Does it repro if you add the following registry value (for testing - not meant to be left around, of course):
Key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main
Value: TabProcGrowth
Type: REG_DWORD
Data: 0

cluberti said:

Does it repro if you add the following registry value (for testing - not meant to be left around, of course):
Key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main
Value: TabProcGrowth
Type: REG_DWORD
Data: 0

Click to expand...

Yes. Issue remains, behavior as before.

OK, so it's not a process issue (TabProcGrowth puts the frame process and any windows or tabs all in the same process, versus process per tab or security zone). That really only leaves registration on hlink/actxprxy/ieframe that could be the culprit. Assuming you've already run a reset on all IE settings, you probably want to run regsvr32 on hlink.dll, actxprxy.dll, and regsvr32 /i /n ieframe.dll to see if it perhaps changes the behavior.

Done all of that. No luck.

EDIT: My upload bandwidth is reserved at the moment because of a large upload job. In about an hour when it's done, I'll add an explaining video here.

EDIT 2: OK, video uploaded. Short explanation: as you can see, simply nothing works after clicking the new tab button.

I wonder if dump files can be created?

Try creating this key:

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Error Reporting\LocalDumps\iexplore.exe

In the iexplore.exe key, create a REG_EXPAND_SZ value named DumpFolder and set the data for the value to %systemdrive%\iedumps . You need to make sure the %systemdrive%\iedumps folder actually exists. Hopefully, there may be a dump file in %systemdrive%\iedumps.

Also, wonder whether this may be related to win7 sp1 beta? I think you mentioned somewhere, you're using the beta.

No, I've not installed SP.

Created the key as you suggested. It was 30 minutes ago and tested IE. It crashed, as before but this time computer went crazy, HD has been constantly spinning since that, desktop is completely frozen, can do nothing. Posting from another computer, at this moment it's about 35 minutes already,

Kari

Sorry to hear that. Looks like it may be part of a bigger problem. Unless its creating a large dump file. :shock:

But it's just IE. Everything else works fine, this is one good laptop if I may say so (about the same than in my system specs, only i5 processor). I am not willing to reinstall because of this, nor can I restore an image because (of course just now!) my last image is almost three weeks old and there's been major installing and updating since that. That's so typical! Normally I create an image every weekend.

The lockup I mentioned in my last post took finally about 40 minutes, then HD stopped spinning, but desktop stayed frozen. No dump was created, Event Viewer has nothing. Hard reset and I'm back.

Normally I'm using Lunascape browser with Trident engine (you can choose in Lunascape between Trident, WebKit and Gecko, global or for every tab different), so I'm good. I just wonder what can cause this. I can use IE, both 8 & 9, completely normally as long as I don't press new tab button. I can open new tab by right clicking a link, and switch between tabs. Everything works 100% as long as I do not click new tab button

New ideas welcome...

Kari

You can always install the debugging tools for windows (32bit, as IE on x64 is still 32bit), then run adplus against a running IE instance to dump it when it crashes - make sure the TabProcGrowth value I mentioned earlier in this thread is still set to 0 in the registry for this test:

1. Create the directory C:\adplus
2. Open IE
3. Open an elevated cmd prompt
4. Change directory to where the 32bit debugging tools are installed - usually "C:\Program Files\Debugging Tools for Windows" (substitute "Program Files (x86)" for x64 versions of Windows, of course)
5. Execute the following command: "cscript adplus.vbs -crash -pn iexplore.exe -quiet -o C:\adplus)"
6. Cause IE to crash - this should cause at least one (maybe more) .dmp files to be created in a subfolder of C:\adplus

If you get 2nd chance .dmp files (they'll say 2nd chance in their name) after IE crashes and closes, those are what we'd want to see (note the command in step 5 will generate a symbol path warning - this can be ignored).