What can I do about a pop-up that says, "Internet Explorer has stopped working?"

by

Pop-up errors can be annoying... or a sign of serious computer trouble. I give a brief description of both.
Question:

What can I do about a pop-up that I get every two seconds that says,
“Internet Explorer has stopped working?”

In this excerpt from
Answercast #17, I look at reasons why Internet Explorer might occasionally stop
working, but every two seconds?

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Internet Explorer has stopped working

Every two seconds, really?

If it’s really every two seconds, then I strongly suspect you have malware on that machine and you need to have somebody, a technician of some sort, take a look at it. Every two seconds means that the machine is, in my opinion, literally unusable.

If you’re not doing anything and every two seconds that’s coming up, that indicates that there’s something very seriously wrong with the machine. I have no idea what that is and you need somebody with hands on access with the machine to take a look and potentially repair it.

Frequent errors

Now, on the other hand, if by “every two seconds” what you really mean is annoyingly often, but not literally 30 times a minute, then I would suggest that you take a look at the article, “How do I disable add-ons in Internet Explorer?“

The most common cause for Internet Explorer crashing like that are the add-ons that are installed: third party add-ons most often.

  • The very first thing I would do is disable all add-ons and see if the problem then goes away.

  • If it doesn’t, I would certainly run the system file checker which will check to make sure that the Internet Explorer files themselves are intact.

  • Finally I have another article called “My explorer.exe has generated an error. Now what?” It goes over a list of additional things to check in addition to the add-ons.

Next from Answercast #17 – How do I tell if my computer is capable of having a wired internet connection?

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2 comments on “What can I do about a pop-up that says, "Internet Explorer has stopped working?"”

  1. As Leo has said “You have prpbably been invaded with some malware.

    We all face these annoying situations so when iot happens on my machine I just log on to :

    http://www.malwarebytes.com and run it either as a complete or quick scan.

    It takes about an hour and will end up showing you dozens (mine sometimes says 52 ) of invasions.

    Then is asks you to DESTROY any that are ticked off. So make sure all are ticked and press DESTROY.

    Likely your problem will be solved without having to call in your friendly guru. Ron

    Reply

  2. This happens on my Windows 7 laptop every single time I start or restart, in my case I have found out why and how to get around it.

    The reason it shows “Internet Explorer has stopped working” is an unknown add-on, and the work-around is so simple that it’s not worth the effort of uninstalling and then re-installing each one just to find out what it is, and then go through the whole process again without said add-on; too many possibilities of making a mistake in my non-expert hands!

    I turn on the laptop, give the machine time to load the initial programs, but I take Great Care Not To Hover the Mouse over Any of the Icons in the Bottom Right of the Task Bar, i.e. the clock, volume control, action centre, hidden icons, etc, as this causes the “IE stopped working” notification to show prematurely.

    I then click “Start” (globe, bottom left) and in the Search Programs box type “internet explorer” and from the resulting list click “Internet Explorer (no add-ons)”. IE will then run, but when an unexpected notification box appears saying “Windows is Restarting” (or something similar) you must Quickly Click “Cancel”, then a second notification box will appear containing an Error Message and an Error Code, I then click “OK” so it disappears. Then close Internet Explorer.

    You can then start IE again in full format by clicking the IE desktop icon or taskbar icon and it will run just fine. And the bottom right taskbar program icons will fine too.

    This work-around adds maybe 15 seconds to start-up, not an issue for me.

    Hope this works for you too!

    Reply

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