Internet Explorer 7 in toolbar mayhem

By anyweb, October 2006.
If you wish to re-publish this article (or parts of), then you are free to do so as long as it links back to here.

Introduction
* part 1 - smileys anyone ?
* part 2 - a handful of toolbars
* part 3 - more toolbars !!
* part 4 - more toolbars plus can we reset Internet Explorer ?

Part 4

more toolbars plus can we reset Internet Explorer

At this stage Internet Explorer 7 in Vista 5728 is looking a mess, over half the screen's real estate is taken up with toolbars, but I want to take this further and try installing some more toolbars. In addition to looking ridiculous, opening TABs no longer works and IE crashes with ease.

Once I've subjected it to some more toolbars, I will then attempt to 'reset' IE to it's default settings to see can it remove most of the junk I stuck onto it.

Next up on my list of toolbars is one called toolbarbrowser.

I clicked on the download link and chose 'run' I got the usual Internet Explorer Security warning, followed by accepting it. Next up, UAC asked my permission to 'allow' the installation. I accepted.

As a result, IE7 now looks like this

Groovy !

Time for yet another toolbar, this time one that'll help you get a job. Without restarting IE, so that i'm not bugged by UAC, i click on the download link. I install the activeX plugin when prompted then install the software after accepting yet another license agreement.

At this point IE becomes unusable with 17 popup windows saying 'error' and i have to kill the tasks in task manager in order to continue.

On with the show, time for another toolbar. This time its one called goodsearch toolbar

It installed painlessly and I didn't notice any warnings about security. Looking closely I could see Internet Explorer protected mode was off, but I restarted IE after killing all it's processes so that was odd. No UAC at all this time.

I can still see some real estate in IE so I decide to torture it some more and go in search of yet another toolbar. After some googling I find one called 'http://www.spiderpilot.com/toolbar/' so i go ahead and attempt to install it. I click on the download link and choose 'run'. Strangely enough UAC now prompts me to give the file permission to install, I allow it. It installs fine.

I'm not done yet ! so I install a few more toolbars namely:-

Fox News Toolbar
SPSFAQ toolbar

At this point I couldn't seem to add any more toolbars (or for that matter, I couldn't WANT to add any more), so I called it a day.

So after all that time wasted being a 'joe user' here's what IE looks like now after my toolbar mayhem.

Mission accomplished I think ! IE7 is now a complete MESS !!!!

After all that, I decide to test if Internet Explorer can reset itself, so I click on tools, internet options, Advanced, and click on Reset.

I had to close messenger live to continue, so I did, and tried again.

And considering what I put Internet Explorer 7 through, the reset tool did a very very very good job, see below, just one toolbar left, and it was Yahoo's, maybe that's a telling result ?.