Saturday, April 21, 2007

Is this XP / IE7 Scenario True?

Just wondering...

At work I am frequently called to do a Windows Repair on Windows 2000 systems. It is usually the last step before we reimage a user's system.

The "Fast Repair" method usually works like a charm, although I almost always have a ton of Windows Updates to reinstall on the systems.

As we convert more of our desktop units from Windows 2000 to XP Pro, I imagine I will be faced with having to do some XP System repairs as well.

For now, we still aren't running Internet Explorer 7 on any of our end user's systems. A few of us IT geeks have it installed, but by and large it isn't "officially" supported yet and we are instructed to take it off if we find a user with it.

So the other day I found this Microsoft Knowledge Base article:

How to perform a repair installation of Windows XP if Internet Explorer 7 is installed

Seems that BEFORE you begin a repair installation of XP, you MUST uninstall IE7 (if so installed) first.

Otherwise Internet Explorer will no longer work after the repair. This isn't needed if you are already running IE6.

I haven't heard of this before or encountered it, but if it is true this could be a real concern for some tech-heads.

I've never had a problem with the W2K repair process and IE not working afterwards. Sure, some malware and LSP blowouts can wreak some havoc, but I'm pretty wise to those issues now.

As IE 7 becomes more prevalent on XP systems, I wonder how many home/professional repair geeks will be reaching for their XP disk to do a system-repair and unwisely fail to uninstall IE7 first then get more confused when IE doesn't work afterwards.

Like I said, I hadn't heard of or encountered this before, but now I know...any you dear readers do as well.

So have you encountered this? What happened?

Thanks for any info!

--Claus

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