Internet Explorer 7 - The Uninstall
This post relates to bug with uninstalling certain versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 which leaves you unable to use Windows. Beta 3 seems to be the most affected, but other versions can experience the flaw as well. To see just the solution, scroll to the bottom of this post... otherwise, enjoy the story that led me to it!
Recently a friend of mine asked for help removing Microsoft's latest brain child, Internet Explorer 7. The program was causing links from other programs (Novell GroupWise for one) to misbehave (ie not open). No problem, for once in their lives, Microsoft actually provided a relatively straightforward removal process for the browser.
According to MSKB 927177, you either use the Add/Remove Programs tool or the provided uninstall utility to remove the new browser. In Add/Remove Programs it is listed as Windows Internet Explorer 7, Microsoft Internet Explorer 7, or Internet Explorer 7. The utility resides in %windir%\ie7\spuninst where %windir% is your WINDOWS directory (normally C:\WINDOWS) and ie7 is a hidden directory.
Now, the friend I was working for had already received the aid of numerous online blogs and forums instructing him to run the Add/Remove programs tool, and delete most of the IE7 directory structure. Unfortunately, this left him with IE7 still installed, and none of the necessary tools to perform a full uninstall.
IE6 installers will not run while any of the IE7 files exist on your computer, and rerunning the IE7 installer did not reinstall the necessary uninstall files. Assuming all versions of IE7 were created equally - and this was my first mistake -, I VPN'ed over to another client's network and snagged their %windir%\ie7 directory to perform the uninstall with. The uninstaller ran fine, and I figured that would be it.
Upon reboot I was greeted with a message from the Borland Wireless tray (and just about every other application that runs on startup) that iertutil.dll was not found. Explorer.exe (the user shell) wouldn't open, and none of the GUI was working particularly well. Luckily I was able to grab the iertutil file from another machine, burn it to CD and transfer it to the system32 directory of my friends computer. This made everything run correctly... mostly. The new version of iertutil.dll I had borrowed was apparently incompatible with my friends laptop. I received an error akin to "Ordinal 57 cannot be found in iertutil.dll". Great, all this work and I still was not done.
Finally, I was forced to rerun the IE7 installer, which, as promised, rebuilt the correct version of iertutil.dll. It also unfortunately reinstalled the IE7 I had worked so hard to remove. It did recreate the appropriate Add/Remove Programs entry, and the %windir%\ie7\spuninst directory, but after having spent almost two hours with the original fiasco, my friend and I decided to leave it as is.
THE QUICK FIX
You're probably looking at a computer with desktop, a working mouse and keyboard, and an error message that says "This application has failed to start because iertutil.dll was not found. Reinstalling the application may fix the problem." Don't panic, this situation is entirely fixable.
To start with, you should be able to launch a Task Manager (Ctrl-Shift-Esc). On the Applications tab, you'll see a "New Task..." button.
Click the button, type "cmd", and press Enter.
Type the following commands:
- cd \ <== Navigate to the root of your C drive
- dir c* <== Search for the directory where you unzipped your IE7 files... normally a long string starting in c
- cd c... <== Navigate to the directory where your IE7 files are
- copy iertutil.dll \windows\system32 <== copy the files you need
- copy normaliz.dll \windows\system32
Now, your directory structure might be a little bit different (eg, you may have \WINNT\system32 instead of \windows\system32). If you cannot find the IE7 unzip directory, I'm hosting a copy of the required dll's on this site. Feel free to download them, but remember, they may not be the right version for you.
Recently a friend of mine asked for help removing Microsoft's latest brain child, Internet Explorer 7. The program was causing links from other programs (Novell GroupWise for one) to misbehave (ie not open). No problem, for once in their lives, Microsoft actually provided a relatively straightforward removal process for the browser.
According to MSKB 927177, you either use the Add/Remove Programs tool or the provided uninstall utility to remove the new browser. In Add/Remove Programs it is listed as Windows Internet Explorer 7, Microsoft Internet Explorer 7, or Internet Explorer 7. The utility resides in %windir%\ie7\spuninst where %windir% is your WINDOWS directory (normally C:\WINDOWS) and ie7 is a hidden directory.
Now, the friend I was working for had already received the aid of numerous online blogs and forums instructing him to run the Add/Remove programs tool, and delete most of the IE7 directory structure. Unfortunately, this left him with IE7 still installed, and none of the necessary tools to perform a full uninstall.
IE6 installers will not run while any of the IE7 files exist on your computer, and rerunning the IE7 installer did not reinstall the necessary uninstall files. Assuming all versions of IE7 were created equally - and this was my first mistake -, I VPN'ed over to another client's network and snagged their %windir%\ie7 directory to perform the uninstall with. The uninstaller ran fine, and I figured that would be it.
Upon reboot I was greeted with a message from the Borland Wireless tray (and just about every other application that runs on startup) that iertutil.dll was not found. Explorer.exe (the user shell) wouldn't open, and none of the GUI was working particularly well. Luckily I was able to grab the iertutil file from another machine, burn it to CD and transfer it to the system32 directory of my friends computer. This made everything run correctly... mostly. The new version of iertutil.dll I had borrowed was apparently incompatible with my friends laptop. I received an error akin to "Ordinal 57 cannot be found in iertutil.dll". Great, all this work and I still was not done.
Finally, I was forced to rerun the IE7 installer, which, as promised, rebuilt the correct version of iertutil.dll. It also unfortunately reinstalled the IE7 I had worked so hard to remove. It did recreate the appropriate Add/Remove Programs entry, and the %windir%\ie7\spuninst directory, but after having spent almost two hours with the original fiasco, my friend and I decided to leave it as is.
THE QUICK FIX
You're probably looking at a computer with desktop, a working mouse and keyboard, and an error message that says "This application has failed to start because iertutil.dll was not found. Reinstalling the application may fix the problem." Don't panic, this situation is entirely fixable.
To start with, you should be able to launch a Task Manager (Ctrl-Shift-Esc). On the Applications tab, you'll see a "New Task..." button.
Click the button, type "cmd", and press Enter.
Type the following commands:
- cd \ <== Navigate to the root of your C drive
- dir c* <== Search for the directory where you unzipped your IE7 files... normally a long string starting in c
- cd c... <== Navigate to the directory where your IE7 files are
- copy iertutil.dll \windows\system32 <== copy the files you need
- copy normaliz.dll \windows\system32
Now, your directory structure might be a little bit different (eg, you may have \WINNT\system32 instead of \windows\system32). If you cannot find the IE7 unzip directory, I'm hosting a copy of the required dll's on this site. Feel free to download them, but remember, they may not be the right version for you.
posted by Mike at 10:17 AM
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