I like to call myself a reluctant Windows user, at best. Microsoft Windows is something I use only when I have to and even then I make sure I don’t touch Internet Explorer even with a 10 ft pole.
Needless to say, whenever I login to my Windows desktop, every couple of weeks, I usually have a slew of updates waiting for me to install them, which I always dutifully install. That’s what updates are for, right ?
Well, this is where the sad part of the story begins. I haven’t really had a problem with any MS updates till now but when Microsoft, in a recent update, pushed Internet Explorer 8 on my computer, all hell broke loose. A lot of web based applications I rely on daily started acting weird. Active-X Add-ons that I need for my work stopped working. IE 8 crashed a lot more and was much more buggy than IE 7 and that is saying something, considering that I hardly used IE 7 also .
Which is why I decided to get rid of IE 8 once and for all and write this post so that it may benefit others who are in a similar situation. I use Windows Vista so some of the instructions might be Vista specific.
