Problems upgrading from IE8 to IE9 on a Sony Vaio on Windows 7

For some months I have been using Internet Explorer 8, when I really wanted to upgrade to IE 9.  But I just couldn’t!  When I tried, the installation seemed to work; then my PC would reboot; and then it would come up in black and white, attempting to set “personal settings”, and would just hang.

Nothing I could do would fix this.  Even if I went to the Advanced Options in IE, and tried to Reset to factory settings, this would hang too.

This evening I finally managed it.  Since I never actually found a page which explained the problem, here are my thoughts.

Firstly, I usually used the 32-bit version of IE8, rather than the 64 bit version.  This was on Windows 7 64-bit.  The reason for this was that IE8 64-bit did not support flash, so a lot of sites did not display their content.  The Flash driver for 64 bit IE8 never did arrive, as far as I can tell.  But I don’t think doing the Reset on the 32-bit does any good.  You need to do whatever you do on the “main” version.

Secondly … you can’t reset IE8 while it is running.  This was the breakthrough.  Instead, close down all your IE instances, and then do Start … Run … inetcpl.cpl.  This is the Control Panel options for IE, and you can access it without IE running.  I was able to do a reset to factory settings OK!  Then, when I started IE8 — using  the 64-bit one, you may be sure — it started normally.

Then, from the 64-bit IE8, I clicked on the IE9 icon and did the install.  I closed IE8 as it ran — no reason to have it open.  I also paused Kaspersky Internet Security — which notoriously interferes with a lot of things.

And … bliss!  IE9 installed just fine.

At least Google should now stop nagging me about using an old version.

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One thought on “Problems upgrading from IE8 to IE9 on a Sony Vaio on Windows 7

  1. People who use EI should not complain, ever. Just try Firefox and everything will be fine!

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