People who know me well know that for the past couple of months, my computer’s been messed up. All of a sudden, IE and several other Internet-based apps like AIM and Outlook would, immediately upon being launched, start sucking 100% of the CPU. The problem manifested itself one day and I spent hours upon hours trying to fix it. Those that know me well also know that there is rarely a Windows problem I can’t fix. But, I just couldn’t figure this one out even after going so far as to running the problematic apps in my Visual C++ debugger to try to pinpoint the issue.

So for the past couple months I’ve been working around the issue. IE not working wasn’t a big deal since I use Firefox exclusively. But workarounds like using Meebo instead of my AIM client was becoming very irritating. The fate that I was almost ready to accept was re-installing Windows. That was until a couple days ago when I was randomly poking around the options panel in IE7 beta that I had recently upgraded to (in hopes of it possibly solving the issue). Low and behold, I came across this button in the Advanced tab:

A Reset button! Note that this is different than the “Restore Defaults” button, which was present in previous versions of IE, that simply resets a few advanced settngs. Upon finding this Reset button, I quickly said “what the heck?!” and clicked it. After a few seconds of churning, magically IE was no longer sucking up 100% CPU. I fired up AIM and Outlook and I practically jumped out of my seat when I confirmed that they also stopped sucking up 100% CPU.

Now that IE is actually usable for me, I’ve played around with this new version and I must say that it is very impressive. Because of the various customizations I have in my Firefox, I won’t switch back to IE7 but this is definitely going to slow - if not halt - the exodus of IE users to Firefox.

If you’re having problems with IE and want to try the Reset button or simply want to get a sneak peak at the next version of IE, go to the Microsoft IE7 page to download it.