IE8 Slow – An addendum to tweaking IE8

As an additional item to the tweaking IE8 blog post, one tweak that has become increasingly popular on  the net involves downloading and installing a package often referred to as the DelDomains package.

While this fix likely won’t do anything for those of you with a fresh install of IE8 on Windows 7 and probably with Windows Vista, it is very likely to help people that have upgraded to IE8 on a crusty old XP box. The reason for this is simple – spyware.

Being that XP was so prone to so many types of malware, most people at one time or another installed programs such as Spybot or Adaware. These programs actually worked very well at controlling and removing spyware and part of this was through the clever use of IE7s security zones. These programs would literally add hundreds of rogue domains to the “blocked” list in IE7 effectively stopping further infection.

When upgrading to IE8, Microsoft, as it rightly should, leaves these browser specific settings alone and imports them into the new IE8 install. However, IE8 seems to deal with these entries in a different fashion than its predecessor which results in a long delay for some – especially while launching the browser. Further to this, the browser doesn’t actually need these sites listed in this fashion anymore as IE8 has an enhanced security regime, which renders this method of blocking unnecessary.

To download the tool, right click here and save the tool to your desktop. Then right click on the file to install.

This tool will delete all of the sites listed in your trusted, enhanced security configuration and restricted zones. Any trusted zones that you have set up yourself will have to be re-added.

This tool has been shown to greatly improve launch time for many.

While on the same topic….there is one tweak that likely won’t help you if your Internet Explorer is working but slow.

Some people have reported that re-registering actxprxy.dll gave their browser a speed increase. Unfortunately, there can be no truth to this.

actxprxy.dll is a file that is automatically registered during the IE8 install and without it IE8 will not even open. Re-registering an already registered file, while doing no harm, will do nothing to your system. This tweak is unfortunately not legitimate. However, if your IE8 install is not opening at all, you could try running regsvr32 actxprxy.dll from an elevated command prompt and this may fix the issue.

Anyway, hope this tip helps.

Cheers