Monday, January 20, 2014

Internet Explorer 11 - Delayed launch time issue fixed

Since I seem to be on a troubleshooting post streak at the moment, here is another issue for reference.

I’m running a Windows 7 (x64) system, 8 GB system RAM, a fast (but not blazing) standard HDD.  Firefox and Chrome are my preferred browsers but I still have Internet Explorer (11) set as my default system browser.

When I do need IE and try to launch it, it can take over 30 seconds to launch…or longer.

It has been a nuisance but since I don’t use IE every day, I haven’t dwelt on it much.

Yesterday I did some Googling on the issue and found a number of links for forums that were addressing a similar problem.

The basic troubleshooting with this type of problem is as follows:

  1. Launch IE with Add-ons disabled by typing “iexplore.exe" -extoff” in the Run field from the start-menu.
  2. IE launched super fast.  Suggesting that an Add-on was causing the delayed launch.
  3. Drop into the “manage add-ons” option in IE.
  4. Select and disable an add-on that may be questionable, save and relaunch IE to test.
  5. If it didn’t help, re-enable the add-on and move on and disable the next.
  6. Repeat until the offender is found.

In my case it turned out to be the IE add-on for Fiddler.

Once disabled, IE launches very fast again.

I’ve left it disabled (as I have also done for the Add-on in Firefox) and will enable it “on-demand” when I have a specific need for it in IE.

Just posting in case others have this issue.

Cheers,

Claus V.

4 comments:

FF Extension Guru said...

Amazing how problematic one add-on can be...more so when you have many add-ons and need to find the troublemaker.

WTB1234 said...

In Manage Add-ons I thought there was a column which showed load time. Or did the fiddler one not register there?

Claus said...

@WTB1234 - You are correct. There is a column in the IE Add-ons pane that does display add-on load-time data. Unfortunately, no data values were provided, which I did find odd.

I've gone back and re-enabled/disabled the Fiddler add-on and still never got it to register load times despite multiple relaunches.

Not sure why the load-times are not registering. There may be another source I could capture that data from but for now I'm not too worried about it.

When I need to use Fiddler in IE, I'll just re-enable it again at that time. Not that big a deal.

Cheers!

--Claus V.

Lasse Finderup said...

For me the fix was removing the %homedrive%%homepath% in the shortcut for Internet Explorer in "Start in:"

After that, IE opens very fast.