Windows Vista Google Toolbar Conflict w/ Vista IE7

I dual booted XP pro and Vista Ult. until one day last week when the workhorse XP drive developed a zillion bad sectors and became an "unmountable boot volume ". Ugh. I'm moving into Vista right now (nothing like not having a choice!) and I've run into a couple of things that might be helpful to record here for posterity.

I kept losing IE in Vista.

and Vista would nicely offer to restart IE for me, of course losing my tabs and pages. It was driving me crazy. Google is our friend, though, and I found out that the Google Toolbar does this. I had installed the latest greatest version thinking that would be Vista friendly. It wasn't. I uninstalled the Google toolbar, rebooted, and then installed an older version of the Google toolbar from the XP days. It has less features, but it does have the ones I use regularly, and since then (knock on wood!) not a single IE crash. I hope this helps someone with a similar problem.

By the way, I koticed the Yahoo & Google toolbars bundled into quite a bit of software I needed to install. Don't do this, people. Whenever software gives you a choice, choose "custom" and read about your options before you decide. I found 4 extra browser toolbars on the kids' computer the other day. This hogs real estate and causes conflicts. I'm sure the kids accepted the toolbars while they were installing things because the toolbar installs are checked by default. Just a heads up.
Johanna

 

And the choir in my house says AMEN! Please please pick custom. Please please don't do auomatic on any downloads. Read it. Choose it or unchoose it! Yahoo toolbar, Google toolbar, Comcast toolbar, I don't care whose toolbar!
Do custom on Windows Updates too! One item at a time so that if Oops occurs you have one starting point with one culprit!
Wonderful post with an essential message.
Read
Think
Choose for yourself
Then click and download

 

I've been suspicious of any toolbars. IMO, best to leave those to 98 users...

 

Good advice, but I don't believe toolbars are a bad idea 100% of the time. I think I'd modify the advice a bit and say don't install any toolbar without first obtaining some valid basis for believing it won't negatively impact your system. And, generally avoid installing more than one browser toolbar.

After all, can we not have some confidence that the big ones, such as Google and Yahoo, are probably OK? I have a Compaq Notebook PC with Vista Home Premium. Most of the manufacturers load a bunch of software on all new computers, much of which most users don't need, right? I uninstalled some of that stuff but left the Yahoo toolbar installed. Honestly, I like it.

 

Hi Johanna,

I wonder if more people haven't had problems with the Google toolbar than known. I love the Google toolbar but have also had to uninstall it on my Vista. My problem was slightly different though. Site pages were loading blank or partially and I was having to refresh pages to get them loaded properly. After Google toolbar removal, I had no problem. Reinstalled Google toolbar problem returned, darn it! I might also say this happened in both IE and Firefox browsers.

I hadn't thought of installing an older version. I'm going to have to give this a try. Thanks for the idea.

Ditto on the software installs and advice on taking time to read what your doing. Your right, it seems more baggage is being tacked on to the popular or commonly downloaded programs or applications. If you don't watch the options for these things and make sure you've unchecked what you don't want, your going to find nuisances that will require removal later. It's getting so you have to eyes in the front, back and sides of head.

 

I like the Google toolbar. I like the auto translator, the right click context menu google look up for highlighted words or phrases, the autofill, the "find on this page ", and so forth. Some features are redundant- like the pop up blocker, and I don't use their spell check (ieSpell is better!) but it's a handy addition to an IE browser for me.

The "average user" who may not understand all the implications tends to go with default settings, and default settings may or may not be appropriate for the situation. This is why system admins lock down the computers they are responsible for- they need to "idiot proof" them so that default is what the admin wants.

When I first got online an experienced user told me, "always choose "custom" if given a choice installing software. How wise that advice turned out to be! Then, if you don't understand the choices- Google (or your favorite search engine!) is your friend. Look it up! But it's your computer, and it should work the way YOU want it to (unless it belongs to that system admin we were talking about!) and it's your responsibility to understand what you did enough to either fix it, or explain it to the BBS or other tech support so that they can help you.
(stepping off soapbox now)
Johanna

 

Great point Johanna, I think it depends on who is driving it....