Yahoo toolbar causing Internet Explorer 8.0 to crash

I had one of my users come and grab me saying that their Internet wasn't working. Anyone who has worked long enough with computers knows this can mean anything but since I was just using the Internet to pull up some information, so I knew it wasn't building wide.

 I followed her to her desk and she launched Internet Explorer 8. It opened and then instantly closed itself. Odd, I opened my self and it did the same thing but stayed open a little longer. I popped open task manger to ensure nothing funny was happening. Didn't see anything funny. I jumped into "Internet Options" and changed the home page to http://www.google.com/ since it is really basic and I thought maybe a page was causing the problem.

Opened IE again and this time it would stay open but the one tab kept crashing and the recovering the tab over and over again. I went ahead and went the through the same process as above and changed it to  a blank page then reopened IE. Same behavior.

I thought maybe it was possibly malware behavior but wasn't really sure. Fired up Process Explorer and Process Monitor by Sysinternals. Process Monitor didn't seem to show anything odd. I then went to Process Explorer thinking that now it was probably a dll loaded with IE with causing a problem. Went to properties, and then Threads for iexplorer. I noticed one of the dlls that was pretty active was yt.dll. I looked at the top of IE and noticed a toolbar, after searching to confirm my thoughts the dll belonged to the yahoo toolbar. I uninstalled the tool bar and reopened IE. It was working fine.

Not sure what changed that caused the sudden problem, no updates happened in that time frame but if you start to have the same problem hope this helps.

UPDATE - I am seeing alot of traffic on this post and from the comments we can tell it's happening to multiple people and it started today. I only had one user with the problem. I saw a yahoo question about this apparently with vista it will tell you that yahoo toolbar is the problem, which would have made the proble easier. My user had xp and it told me nothing other than crashing. I will be contacting yahoo, if they don't already know. Curious if it's a certain toolbar version.

UPDATE 2 - I did see that the following update got installed yesterday on the computer: KB2079403. You can read the following link by microsoft http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2079403 and it seems to apply to all versions of windows. Dark stated his had a similar issue but that he had no such updated, and the last update was 11/19. So furhter proof it's most likely not microsoft update.

Update 3 - It looks like probably the problem had to do with an older version of the toolbar. Most people don't update theirs. What caused it to break today is still a mystery.

FOR THOSE WANTING JUST THE FIX AND NOT THE STORY
-Just uninstall the Yahoo toolbar.
-Install the latest version of the toolbar if you still want it. (Latest version seems to be working)

IE8 Strikes again

Summary: My wife tells me that the internet seems slow on our Desktop at home. She says it seems to get worse using 2 tabs. After using it seems that is the case. It acts as if wireless is at the edge of a connection even though I was connected fine. It was happening in both IE and Firefox.

Troubleshooting: Anyways I check the wireless, fine. I test a constant ping to Google using "ping -t www.google.com" No problem. I reboot all wireless routers involved just for kicks. (We have a Wireless Bridge that connects us to my parent’s network down the road.) No go. I also grabbed my trusty Laptop and suffer no problems. I look to see if any updates may have been causing the problem. Nothing had been installed recently to cause it. Also ran a full scan just for kicks by my antivirus, nothing. At this point I think I might have an idea of the culprit.

Solution: So I uninstalled Internet Explorer 8. Restart and POW, it works awesomely.

Conclusion: So far this is the 2nd time this has happened with IE8. Both times on a Vista Machine. I haven't had an issue with IE8 on all the computers here at work, which is plenty, but 98% of them are XP. I am wondering if how IE8 ties into Vista(maybe win 7 too) is causing this issue. I don't pretend to know the under workings of IE8. The thing I dislike is that it affects Any browser on the machine, not just IE8. So IE8's hooks are deep or something it modifies when installed is in front of all browsing. I must say though I have often just used IE8 but for personal use, Firefox is my highest recommendation at this point and checking the don't install IE8 update. IE7 doesn't seem to have this problem.

The Beginning - Can Ping, but can't Browse

So this is a project I have played with in my mind for awhile now. I run across a lot of useful information I would love to share with others that are in Information Technology field themselves, Home Power Users(The people that the family uses for free), or the normal users. Now not to say all the info here will be tech related, but most of it will. I do have a life so some of it may sneak out here but we will see.

Anyways for my first post: I had a friend that was unable to browse the internet, but was using an Alltel data card. So I gave them their number, yes I had it on my phone because I deal with them very often, I recommended that he call them and if he still had a problem to give me a holler. After sometime I got a call back from him letting me know he still had the issue, so I told him to bring it in.

After getting it, I verified the problem. The Alltel card would connect but no internet grabbed a network cable and plugged it in just to ensure the problem wasn't limited to that interface. Same problem. I then jump into the Command Prompt (cmd) and ping good ole' www.google.com and get a steady response. Hmmm, So I grab my USB stick and load Firefox onto the computer. YAY, wait never mind. I couldn't get to the internet there. But I was still able to ping quite nicely. Also some other services seemed to work. So I decided that something was screwing up browsing.

At the same time his antivirus wasn't working, usually I would blame a virus for that but it was Norton 360, and sadly I have had many issues with that software in its different versions. So I load up Microsoft's Security Essentials and it's able to pull up its definitions and after a quick scan nothing scary. So most likely Norton not working is just coincidental not a problem linked to this issue at hand.

After searching around Google with various terms. Some people mentioned different Suggestions. Resetting Winsock, System Restore, running some other tests, and uninstalling recent updates. So after doing all the ones up to the updates. I did notice he had gotten 5 updates the day before he called me. One of them being Internet Explorer 8, which I ignored at first since it was on many of our work computers and hadn't caused a problem. I removed a security update and another Vista update. Rebooted, still no go. So uninstalled IE8, rebooted.......

It worked. So during the update process for it, it must have borked up Vista. Anyways, I hope that helps some others that run into this problem. Now off to bed.