Friends,
If there was ever an example to prove that I don’t know what I’m doing down at the Festival of Dirt, this is it. It’s complicated, so bear with me here…
There’s a fairly problematic machine in the mix down there. My predecessors had tried all sorts of idiotic tricks to make various flaky software packages work. Undocumented. Unauthorized. Non-standard reaching for marginal functionality. Workarounds are the norm for anyone who uses that machine, but the bill finally came due today. I had even implemented some of those insane fixes. Internet Explorer 7 stopped working, so I installed Firefox and let it go. The big problem is that some of our internal software now requires IE. Time to finally make it work.
- Having uninstalled balky IE, I now needed to reinstall.
- Use Firefox to download a new version of IE and run the installer.
- Reboot.
- IE 7 won’t run.
- Check the DLLs. They’re set to load the Dependency Checker instead of registering themselves. Fix that. Still won’t run.
- Reboot.
- IE 7 still won’t run. Use Firefox again to download IE 6. Run installer. Error message says “setup has detected a newer version and will quit.”
- Uninstall IE 7 and restart.
- Run IE 6 installer again. “Processes requiring a restart have not completed. Installer will quit.”
- Reboot.
- Run IE 6 installer again, and again error message says “setup has detected a newer version and will quit.” Wha?
- Check Start menu and notice that IE 7 is listed as the default web browser. What are the odds? Click on IE 7 and it runs. It runs!
In a nutshell, I uninstalled a piece of software, which then appeared and ran properly. What? Are you kidding me?
Absurd Microsoft shenanigans? Alright super genius Windows dudes, what happened here? Cripes!
– bob