This may not apply to very many of you, but it was a bug I experienced in Internet Explorer 7 which took me quite a bit of effort to find the solution while driving me absolutely crazy in the meantime.

When selecting a drop down box with your mouse to make your selection, Internet Explorer 7 would suddenly crash, forcing you to shut down the program then restart. As long as you do not select anything in the drop down box, IE does not crash. This problem does not occur with every drop down box you may encounter with Internet Explorer 7, rather, it occurs quite randomly.

The problem generally goes away if you download and install the latest Internet Explorer updates from http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com/.

However, if you feel comfortable making some slight changes to your registry, you can fix this problem in about 60 seconds. Here’s how:

1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit in the Open box, and then click OK.
2. Locate the following registry subkey, and then click the following registry subkey:
   HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\FeatureControl\FEATURE_USE_WINDOWEDSELECTCONTROL
   (Note: If you cannot locate the FEATURE_USE_WINDOWEDSELECTCONTROL key, create the FEATURE_USE_WINDOWEDSELECTCONTROL key under the FeatureControl key.)
3. On the Edit menu, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
4. Type Iexplore.exe, and then press ENTER.
5. Right-click Iexplore.exe, and then click Modify.
6. In the Value data box, type 1, and then click OK.
7. Exit Registry Editor.

The next time you open Internet Explorer, the problem should be resolved. A quick fix to such an annoying problem!

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