Brad Feld

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*#)$()@#$% Internet Explorer

Jul 04, 2006
Category Technology

I know I’m in a bitching about my computer mood.  I’m particularly grumpy because I’m on day two of the update / reboot cycle, which is just stupid. 

Among other things, my Microsoft Outlook config in Homer isn’t connecting to our Exchange server because we modified our email configuration about six months ago.  Ross is on vacation until tomorrow so I don’t want to bother him, so I figured I’d just use OWA, which works fine.  However, I noticed that I was running the IE 7.0 Beta 1 (which I must have installed 10 months ago – we are just now on beta 3) so I decided to try to upgrade to IE 7.0 Beta 3 since there are lots of noticeable bugs (and a weak feature set for IE 7.0 Beta 1.)

Thirty minutes later and two reboots later I gave up.  I can’t get past the Install Windows Internet Explorer “Internet Explore 7 is already installed on this computer.  Please use ‘Add or Remove Programs’ in the Control Panel to uninstall it.” error message.  Of course, IE 7 is not listed in Add or Remove Programs messing around with Add/Remove Windows Components simply deleted IE from my quick launch toolbar, but didn’t actually get rid of it.

For a brief moment, I thought I’d lost IE forever (it was gone, but I couldn’t get past the IE 7 is already installed message) so I said (and I think I said this out loud because Amy turned and looked over at me) “fuck it – I’ll just use Firefox for OWA.”  I fired it up and then remembered the reason I use IE for OWA is that when OWA sees Firefox as the user agent, it gives me the crappy last version instead of the pretty good current version.

I dug around for IE 7B1 on my machine and found it pretty quickly, so I’m back to where I started 30 minutes ago.  And I thought I was pretty good at this.