Fueled by my recent find, I set off to find what was hopefully a simple registry tweak to set my IE homepage on my smartphone. It turns out it’s as simple as changing the value of the following key to the URL of your choice:

HKey_LocalMachine\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\AboutURLs\home

If you don’t have one already, download one of the many Windows Mobile registry editors (I use the one by PHM).

It never occurred to me though looking back now it should have. Today I finally found out what was causing the crash that I was running into several times a day on my main Vista machine at home.

Since I installed Vista on this box I’ve been running into a crash when closing Internet Explorer 7. Right after closing IE I’d get a dialog saying “Internet Explorer has encountered a problem and needs to close.” It would happen almost 75% of the time I’d guess and it was a bit annoying as it would re-launch IE every time if I didn’t cancel it in time. I tried all kinds of things to see if I could narrow it down but never got a clue. I also couldn’t repro it on demand so I never got around to trying to debug to get further clues but never got around to it. It would happen very often through through real use but I just couldn’t figure out the specific thing that triggered the failure.

Today, I got a Vista dialog that popped up soon after I rebooted the machine. It said it had a known solution for a problem I have been encountering and to click the link to get the problem fixed. It led me to this page on Microsoft.com and I read through the KB article and immediately got impressed as this was really talking about the exact problem I’ve been having. This is one of the first times I’ve seen this dialog where it really is actually helping me. A really great experience overall and I’m sure I’ll be seeing plenty more of these dialogs over time and I’ll pay attention to every single one. It’s a vastly better experience than just blindly installing updates and hoping things get fixed only to find most of the time that they didn’t.

The repro for the crash turned out to be incredibly simple. Here’s how the KB article sums it up:

Consider the following scenario. On a Windows Vista-based computer that contains the Microsoft Fingerprint Reader, you use Windows Internet Explorer 7 to visit a Web site. You click a combo box control, such as a drop-down list or a text box that has an attached list. You exit Windows Internet Explorer 7.

All I had to do was use a combo box and it would have repro’d. I would have never imagined it would have been something as basic as that but it sure makes sense now. The patch is to the software that comes with the Microsoft Fingerprint Reader and I’m happy to say it sure seems to be working…

When I first got my MacBook Pro (which I honestly now rarely use–maybe I should sell it?), I ended up using FireFox as my primary browser. The feature I really loved the most and missed whenever working on Windows was its inline search/find feature whenever you hit the equivalent of Ctrl-F on the Mac. Instead of the clunky ancient IE dialog box it added a small strip to the bottom of the browser window and allowed you to search from there. It was really nicely integrated.

Now, I’ve started using an add-in for IE that basically does the same thing. You can get the Inline Search add-in here.