The latest security update for IE is causing problems for many users’ systems. IE will pause on a blank screen. After a very long delay, the page may or may not load.
XP’s latest security update creates complications with Internet Explorer on many people’s systems.
Here is Microsoft’s annoucement on KB905915.
If the update has not affected your system, just leave it alone. Not all systems are affected.
After the update is installed, IE will just hang on a blank screen. During this time, many CPU cycles will be used without obvious cause. Killing iexplorer.exe through the Task Manager will close the IE window. Sometimes IE will even work correctly for a while when reloaded after the process kill.
This seems isolated to IE as Firefox can be used successfully while IE is hanging. However, users are reporting system degradation as well so the bug may affect more than IE itself.
Removing the KB905915 security update will fix this problem.
This update can be uninstalled through the Add/remove software section of the Control Panel. You’ll need to check the show updates box to see this update.
Update:
Some sites are suggesting that this bug occurs for users that have installed IE7 on their system in one way or another. To fix it, you just need to remove the following registry key (not case sensitive):
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{C90250F3-4D7D-4991-9B69-A5C5BC1C2AE6}
