Launch problem with IE 6

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

Awhile back (though I can't find the thread), I had an issue with launching Office applications. I had installed a trial version of Office 2007 while writing my latest SharePoint 2007 book. After I was done, I uninstalled the trial using Add/Remove Programs. After that, I had all kinds of issues launching my full version Office apps. I solved the problem by using the Office install disk and doing a repair.

My Office apps launch now without fault, but I have a new problem. Everytime I launch IE 6, I get a dialog saying:

When I click OK, the Windows Installer shows the "Preparing to install" dialog and hangs. I have let it run, but it doesn't do anything from there. Clicking on the Cancel button doesn't help, and I have to use Task Manager to kill the installer. Once the installer has been killed, IE launches normally. This happens every time I launch IE 6 and only happens when I launch that app.

Opening Event Viewer and clicking on Application, reveals an Application Hang error, stating:

There's also an Information notice that states:

Apparently, there's still something on my PC that the trial Office 2007 software left behind.

BTW, this is a Windows XP Pro SP 2 computer.

Any ideas? Thanks.

EDIT: I found the link to my original thread:

http://www.certforums.co.uk/forums/thread23483.html

 

Ah good old winblows.... at least you're not on Vista, they've started their the browser is the OS fun and games again, try uninstalling or re-installing IE 7, yep far as i'm aware you can't...

Its almost as if microsoft thinks bloatware and dependency madness is the way to beat open source...

You installed a M$ trail when you had a fully working version ?

Well I guess the upside is we get better backup and reinstall software, cos we're gonna need it !

Like most of windows its built out of COM components that must be correctly registered in the registry, I'd try a reinstall of IE 6 see it that fixes it, if not get onto microsoft support forums and find the relevant DLL's you need to register/unregister. Your chances of getting back to a 100% system though patching up the registry are slim.

 

I have had this issue before with something else but the same .dll error, what I did to fix it was to find everything to do with the application delete it completely, run Ccleaner then retry it and it worked. I also tidied up the registry with Ccleaner.

 

Sounds like it's a much lower level issue than reinstalling would fix. Googling 'rundll.exe' points it out as an essential Windows process for loading .dlls into memory. Now, according to the error, rundll.exe is trying to run from a null address (0x00000000) which is invalid/protected depending on the application - so if it can't run it can't load the relevant .dlls allowing the task that you wish to perform to be processed.

Have you run Windows update and cleared your system of any junk?

 

You said it!

 

Rundll.exe acts as a COM server for COM DLL's that want to run as servers, DLL's can't run by themselves they need a host exe process.

The version and address look invalid, probably simply because a whole load of config is wrong or missing.

CCleaner is indeed a good idea, it might help in the way that gbl describes, if it can remove the right cruft from the registry it might fix it. The same theory applies to uninstalling/reinstalling, unregistering/re-registering. Basically you are trying to restore an unknown portion of the registry to a reasonable state.

 

Trip, you might have some luck using this application, it's worked for me in the past..

Microsoft's Windows Installer CleanUp Utility

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290301

Or, try installing IE7

 

On a side note, whenever I uninstall software, I use Revo, I think it is a very good and very useful freeware tool.