IE8, Speedtouch 585, New mysterious problem

I have a very strange problem. I just installed IE8 on two machines, Vista and XP. Both on network with Speedtouch 585V6. Everything had been working fine.

Now, with some websites, they never appear, the tab just waits with a blank window. Other websites are OK and at other times the website will appear. If I try the same website in Firefox at the same time it will appear, so its a problem at my end.

Now before you tell me that it is obviously IE8 and I'm an idiot not simply to use Firefox, the odd thing is that searching the net does not show up this issue with anyone else using IE8. And I can't help thinking it is some sort of firewall or IP issue on my network. I tried turning off the Windows firewall and the Speedtouch firewall, but it made no difference. The Speedtouch does some sort of address translation I seem to remember - perhaps that is relevant.

Any suggestions please - it is very frustrating.

Edited by deleted (Thu 26-Mar-09 09:44:26)

This is, I believe, a known problem with IE8, and one that I have experienced. I thought there were several references to it in various forums; I also thought that it had been cured in the latest build, but perhaps not.

I'm running the new, released version of IE8. I can't find any reference to the problem. Perhaps this is because I can't think of the right words to search on.

Had read of some issues with some sites not working in IE8 in early betas

http://forums.cnet.com/5208-6142_102-0.html?threadID... are fairly recent posts with people talking of 1 to 5 minutes for a page to show. The following is interesting

Not sure that this will help all of you but I found some info posted on some blogs and newsgroups that helped me. It appears that if you run or have run Spybot or SpywareBlaster and have immunized your system you may have over 10,000 sites in your restricted sites list (Tools/Internet Options/Security/Restricted Sites) and IE 8 can't deal with that many restricted sites and turns into a slug. The person that ID'ed the problem also said that removing all the resticted sites would solve the problem and it did for me. Reinstalled IE8 after removing all of my restricted sites and it launches REALLY fast now and also quickly loads my home page too. WHAT A DIFFERENCE!!!!.

Not dared to risk IE8 on a spare machine yet

Googling "IE8 hang problem" turned up quite a few links that related to the problems I was having. (I run IE8 on Windows 7.)

In reply to a post by rbeal:

I'm running the new, released version of IE8. I can't find any reference to the problem. Perhaps this is because I can't think of the right words to search on.

Hi, I am interested in this problem before I upgrade to IE8. So the unable to open certain
websites is occurring with Windows XP and Vista when using IE8.
Therefore, the problem is with IE8 or those particular websites.

Similar problem here http://forums.thinkbroadband.com/general/t/3601606-r...

Thanks for the various ideas.

1. I have no restricted sites set up, so it isn't that.

2. It isn't a problem with those websites, since another time IE8 will open the same page immediately with no problem.

3. Most of the "ie8 hang problem" results relate to the whole program hanging or problems with beta versions. It looks as if they used to have this bug and now it is still there, but only for me!

The next problem was finding that IE8 was using staggering amounts of memory. At one point it was using 1GB.

I have now abandoned it and installed Firefox. It works all the time and takes only about 75MB typically.

Perhaps it is just my computers but I have found IE8 to be a disaster. Maybe they will fix it.

similarly...

I have the same kind of problem with IE8 on XP for the setup page in my SMC router.

When I open 192.168.2.1 , the tab just sits with a blank page in the "connecting" mode.
It seems to have something to do with either the page in the router ,whose source I can view, which contains a lot of JavaScript circa 2006, or it might be because the router file that is being opened has the extension '.smc' - which as I experiment doesn't seem to be recognized by IE8 as html.

SMC blames Microsoft of course.

Using IE8 compatibility mode doesn't help. I've also tried changing many of the IE8 security settings but to no avail.

No problem with IE7 or IE6.

Hi Guys, I have exactly the same problem with IE AND Firefox (my chosen browser). I've uninstalled Firefox and downloaded the latest version - still the same. The problem exists at home with my PC on hard-wire and amcbook pro on wireless. I can access the sites using identical bookmarks from my office - same ISP, same hosting package,just a different router. It's only happened since I updated the router software.