Magic drug for Windows issues.

I found that many problems with Window's Media Player, Internet Explorer 8, and Windows in general can be solved with a simple batch script. You can find it here: ie8-rereg Just make sure you run it as administrator or you will get access denied errors . I don't know how it happens but some of the dlls seem to get unregistered or their entries in the registry get messed up but this script re-registers them fixing the issue. Just make sure Internet Explorer 8 and Windows Media Player are closed, run the script as administrator and when the script is finished you shouldn't even need to reboot. Everything just starts working. This script is one of the first things I run on people's computers when I run into weird seemingly unsolvable issues. So far it has saved me countless hours of reinstalling windows on other's computers!! I know it won't solve everything but it just might solve what you need it too. I've personally ran this script on WinXP Home/Pro and Vista without issues. So far no one has had an issue where I needed to run this script on Win7. The design of the script is very straight forward and shouldn't cause any new issues but your mileage may vary, of course. I've compiled a small list of problem I've had fixed by this script. Generally if you have one of the listed problems you will have most of them and may not know it until you start testing everything I list here. Windows Media Player

  • Blank elements in the UI.
  • Doesn't even open; wmplayer.exe appears in the tankmgr for only a moment.

Internet Explorer 8

  • Blank elements/webpages
  • New tabs/windows don't work or crash Internet Explorer.
  • Can't print (most times the print dialog won't even open)
  • Javascript/VBscript don't work; causing websites that rely too heavily on them to look terrible.
  • Flash (other plugins too) do not load properly in webpages.
  • Some of the menu items do not work at all. Add-ons Manager for one. "Find on this Page" for two.

Generic windows issues

  • Windows Search stops functioning, well technically anything that uses the "common tasks" bar; as that is just an ie frame with special privileges. This includes explorer.exe, services.msc, gpedit.msc, add/remove users control panel app, many others windows applications I can't think of.
  • File save/open dialog doesn't work like it should. Not the small simple one; the one with My Computer, My Documents and the like on the left side.

Other Applications

  • Mcafee and Norton's main application windows do not open correctly. They have actually been loading up an ie8 frame inside of themselves then exposing a custom interface to the embedded frame for several years now.

Published on 2011-02-17 14:24:36.