Internet Explorer 9 crashes when opened.

 

I was working on a friends computer this weekend and have found that when they upgraded to Internet Explorer 9, every time they open IE9 it crashes. They have Windows Vista Service Pack 2.

At first I thought it was just a failed installation of IE9, so I removed IE9 which put them back at IE8 and everything worked. I checked the computer for malware, cleaned up a lot of it using Malware Bytes and then removed their expired Norton Antivirus in favour of the free Microsoft Security Essentials product. I also used IE8 to run a Trend Micro HouseCall scan over it too which confirmed it was pretty much clean.

Once I was happy that there didn’t "appear" to be any malware there, I reinstalled Internet Explorer 9 thinking the problem would be sorted. Unfortunately it was not. It still crashed whenever you launched IE9 with the same message.

Ok – this time we delve into the event logs – actually hindsight says I should have started there first, but it’s a weekend and my brain

So I do some digging and found that igdumdx32.dll is in fact linked to the Intel Graphics driver on this computer.

Hardware Acceleration is one of the new features in IE9 and given the relationship to the graphics driver, I opted to disable the hardware acceleration feature of IE9 – you can get to this via Control Panel > Internet Options > Advanced Tab.

Ok – so once we Enabled Software Rendering instead of using GPU rendering and voila – IE9 works as expected.

I then tried to see if we could upgrade the video card drivers to resolve the issue. 

 

Acers site sadly had nothing more recent than 2008 which is a pity. 

I opted to check Intels site and found they did have more recent drivers – from Jun 2011 – I installed them as below.

I then attempted to revert the software rendering in favour of the hardware acceleration, but alas – it still failed.  Long story short – not everything works as expected with IE9 due to lack of driver support from vendors.