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Delete Browsing History Is Looping

13 years ago

When I start IE8, click Safety, click Delete Browsing History and click on the DELETE Button, Delete Browsing History Window starts but never finishes. The items checked for deletion on the request are unchanged (same as always): Preserve Favorites Website Data; Temporary Internet Files; History.

I recently left it running 15 minutes and it was still processing but really, doing "nothing".

When I press the Cancel Button, it says "Canceling..." but it never stops.

When I switched to ALT+CTL+DLT, highlighted Delete Browsing History and clicked the End Task Button, I got a window saying that the program was not responding and I clicked the End Now Button. Nothing happened until a 'Run a DLL as an App' Window popped up again saying that the progran was not responding and to "please tell Microsoft about this problem". I clicked on the Send Error Report Button, Close Button on the next window and that was that.

Question #1. Are there other ways to do the same thing? Ways that will not put me in a loop? Doing Disk Clean Up to do delete items from the Temporary Folders is slow. And am not sure how else to get rid of History once in a while. I have Firefox 4.0 but do not know my way thru it enough to tell if it has an automatic way to clear my temp files and history when I exit of Firefox.

Question #2. Has this happened to anyone else? Does anyone know how to fix it? The only new thing that I have done recently to the PC is get rid of Ad-aware and install Super Anti Spyware Free Edition in its place. Nothing unusual happened during the un-install and the install.

TIA, Luis

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Comments (4)

mike_kaiser_gw
13 years ago
My gut reaction is that IE is being a little buggy or there's a corrupt file somewhere. You might want to start with an error check of your disk (My Computer, right click on the drive in question, choose properties, then tools). It will require a reboot.

You can also manually delete temp files by typing %temp% at either run or search (depending on your version of Windows). You may find thousands of files in there. If you try to delete them all at one time you'll likely get a message about a file being in use. That's normal, just work around those (delete the oldest files first). After that, navigate up the directory tree and you'll find the history folder.
luis_pr
Original Author
13 years ago
I did not mention it on the original post but I already scanned the hard drive for errors and had no problems. I assume IE is suddenly buggy but am not sure why now and-or how to proceed.

If the problem is a corrupt file, can IE8 be reinstalled -EASILY- to overlay the bad file with a new file? Or should I dump IE8 and use Firefox only (I will still need some way to do those deletion tasks on a regular basis with Firefox) ?
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shaxhome (Frog Rock, Australia 9b)
13 years ago
This may help....

Here is a link that might be useful: Clear History
ravencajun Zone 8b TX
13 years ago
you can use a third party app like ATF
ATF-Cleaner

you should be able to re-install IE8 on top of the old one and it should correct bad files, however there is no promise. Is that the only buggy problem you have with IE? if there is more then a re-install will probably be the way to go.

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