Too late. I installed it before posting this article. Took it out for short a test drive - dslreports.com speed test, tried out the tabs, uninstalled Google Toolbar, noticed Menu toolbar was located lower, enabled pop-up blocker, closed IE7, and denied it access on my software firewall. It seemed to be running okay. None of my apps appear to have sufferd any damage so I guess I got off lucky compared to you. You're not alone with all the problems you're having associated with installing IE7. I noticed a thread on dslreports.com with people asking for help fixing all sorts of problems. Looks like you were dealt aces and eights. Wish I could help but IE is integrated into practically the whole OS, you're best option may be to backup data and reformat drive c. Sorry, Cat!
Mine's working fine, my only complaint is I haven't been able to drag and drop all the toolbars into a single one that is only 1 line high when I go full screen yet like I could with IE6. Maybe I'll find the setting, but it's only 2 lines high and since I set it to auto-hide anyway I hardly even notice.
That's what one of my colleagues said after I sent an internal notice my experience. He too installed it, and got IE7 to crash every time. And we both have fairly generic, vanilla flavor installations of XP Pro. But having worked at a major software company, I'll let you in on a little secret. The software companies test their software in the simplest, out of the box configurations of the operating system. Which isn't so much of a problem with OSes such as Solaris or AIX (HP-UX is a different story), but Windblows? you can see all the hoopla. And on Thursday I thought that after all those years of complaints, MS had learnt something. No. Still no responses to my and many others' complaints on the bulletin board hosted by this very company!
I don't care, as I went back to IE6, but as I reported, I'm having problems with it now, always opening new windows, opening blank windows, problems not uncommon if you google Web or Groups, but with no answers on the MS website, or from our own promoter of this company here, who only engages in exchanges of insults. It's all marketing and lobbying on forums such as this!
Unfortunately, I cannot entirely switch to Firefox, as I support applications that our users run on IE (or whatever, but IE is the base you just can't dismiss.) So I'll have to ask our sysadmins to "repair Internet Explorer", which means reinstalling it from a CD. Now, why would one have to "repair" an executable binary file? If it were corrupted it wouldn't run at all. But it runs, and it runs badly which means some configuration file is corrupted. Well, what file, what configuration? Microsoft won't tell you. Absurd! If you've been around long enough you'd know that both UNIX and OpenVMS configurations are all accessible to users and system administrators and that a concept such as "repairing" a single executable hadn't existed until Bill and Melinda Gates (bless their baby, their lakeside mansion, and their selfless efforts to save the world from itself) invented it!