Solved: IE Slowdown

For the last couple of weeks, I have had problems with IE running very slowly (I know, I know – you’re going to say I should use Firefox. And I do. But I am a developer, and my customers use IE, so…). After messing about trying to repair IE, I finally resolved the issue.

I already knew that the problem was specific to IE. Firefox was fine, so I knew my connection to the internet was fine. Also, Outlook rendered HTML emails fine, so I guess the MSHTML rendering engine is fine, too. But IE itself was still dead-dog-slow.

My next step was to download a little utility, called ToolbarCop, that lists add-ins that have been installed in IE, and allows them to be disabled / enabled one at a time. I disabled them all, then re-enabled them one-by-one, re-starting IE after each re-enablement.

I soon discovered that it was the Google Toolbar BHOs that were the problem. So, I un-installed the toolbar and deleted the references to the BHOs.  After verifying that IE worked properly, I did a fresh install of the toolbar and checked everything was still OK.

Job done! Now I can get back to development.

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