Why does Internet Explorer keep stopping and restarting?

In this excerpt from
Answercast #80, I look at some odd problems that frequently occur in
Internet Explorer that may make it seem like it is not working.

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Internet Explorer restarting

So, unfortunately, it’s unclear as to exactly what a “stop and restart” really means.

If it’s a true crash (meaning that Internet Explorer is going away completely), then I would point you at a couple of articles:

• “IExplorer.exe has generated an error, now what?” and;

• “How do I disable Internet Explorer add-ons?“

Browser add-ons

The latter one is important because nine times out of ten, Internet Explorer crashing is not because of Internet Explorer. It’s because of one or more of the add-ons that have been installed into Internet Explorer from some third party.

Fortunately, it’s very easy to disable them all and see if that, in fact, that makes the problem go away.

If it does, you can start re-enabling them one at a time to see which one causes the problem to return.

IE Hardware acceleration

The other thing that’s kind of interesting and unique about Internet Explorer 9 is its use of hardware acceleration.

That can sometimes make the browser appear to stop responding completely until you do something like (I don’t know) cause it to repaint, or minimize and maximize, or move it around, or any number of weird things. It’s really obscure when it happens.

I have an article on that that I’m going to point you to. It’s called “How do I get Internet Explorer 9, IE 9, to work at all?” It really does look like IE 9 doesn’t work at all when you’re in that situation.

Fortunately, once again, there’s a simple checkbox that you can uncheck or check (I’m not sure which) that allows you to disable IE 9’s use of hardware acceleration. That can make a lot of problems with IE 9 disappear completely.

(Transcript lightly edited for readability.)