Very Slow Internet in IE, other browsers fine

[enjay]

One of our teachers installed something onto their laptop, and got the usual amount of crapware which goes with some of these free installers. I have removed all the additional applications (from Control Panel and then confirmed by browsing C:\Program Files and C:\Users\username\AppData), the IE toolbars, etc and returned the home page and search engine settings back to where they should be; from what I can see, all traces of the things which had been installed have gone, BUT... Internet Explorer is running painfully slowly. The pages load completely, however the little blue circle icon keeps spinning and IE pretty much crashes. Chrome is unaffected.

Other than a full rebuild of the laptop (which I really don't want to do, as this person has all sorts of local customisations), what can I do to restore IE to its normal performance?

[elsiegee40]

Have you tried uninstalling and re-installing IE? (Backup the favorites first though )

[dksniper]

It could be the new adobe flash, if you log in with admin rights, add user write permissions to these folders and see if that cures it. Give full permissions for everyone to the following 2 folders:

C:\programdata\adobe
C:\ Windows\system32\macromed\

[kaphc]

Thanks, @dksniper, that looks useful. I have had issues with new build machines running IE slowly unless it's run without add-ons. Works fine with an admin login and Chrome works fine. It's been driving me mad as I tried to disable and re-enable each add-on without luck.

Is there an issue with the new flash updates then that you know of? We're on version 11.6.

[dksniper]

It came to our notice in early January this year if that helps. Since then we have a batch file running on GPO so not sure which version affected it, sorry.
Cheers Dave

[kaphc]

That would tally with the school I've seen this problem at. We had new netbooks and a head's PC in January and we've had to switch them over to using Google Chrome because of the issues with the speed of IE9. It's been driving me mad try to figure out what was causing it, but I knew there had to be some sort of conflict. I'm not at that site again until Monday but I'll certainly try giving access to those folders as it sounds like a probable solution.

[kaphc]

@dknsiper I'm on site at the school this morning, tested it on one netbook and all of a sudden the speed is back on Internet Explorer, and pages are loading properly! That issue has been troubling me for weeks and I am so pleased to have found a solution to it. Must be the combination of IE9 and one of the recent versions of Flash.

I'll certainly keep an eye out for this in future again, though hopefully new releases will fix this.

[dksniper]

Kaphc - Pleased that info helped. It bugged us for a short while.

[kaphc]

Just to resurrect this thread, I'm having the same problem in another school. Again it's a machine running Windows 7 and IE9 and Flash 11.6. I've given permissions to the folders on the hard drive but it hasn't had the same effect in speeding Internet Explorer up. If I log on with an Administrator account the speed of Internet Explorer is fine so I know it's definitely some kind of permissions thing again.

Just wondering if anyone had anything else they can recommend .... or otherwise I'm going to be rolling back Flash to a previous version if I can find one!