Your help, please, with a baffling phenomenon. I’d be delighted if anyone can ever suggest how this is possible, let alone how to *fix * it.
On just two specific websites, and no others, if I attempt to use the ‘Back’ button I instantly get that irritatingly useless error message: ‘This program has performed an illegal operation error and will be shut down’. I have to close my browser, then open it again and carry on.
Running Windows 98SE on a fairly good spec PC. IE 5. No other problems or errors. Not a virus. Can otherwise enjoy surfing the web with impunity, can use ‘Back’ and ‘Forward’ happily on every other site or set of sites I visit, which is a great many. Error occurs even if I use the pull-down menu under the ‘Back’ button.
The two sites this happens with are Amazon.co.uk and the discussion boards part of the Imdb.
It’s probably a problem with your version of IE 5 - I’ve had problems with the coding of some pages working with IE 5 like windowsupdates.microsoft.com - you could probably just update IE 5 to 6.1 and aliviate the problem, but I’m assuming there is a reason you won’t or can’t.
Does your system give any more info than the above error message? Is there a Details… button you are skipping? Have you tried other browsers, Firefox, Netscape, Opera?
First, what happens if you use Ctrl+Left Arrow (or whatever the shortcut for Back happens to be in IE 5.0)?
Since Amazon and IMDb both serve a lot of actively generated content, it could be a problem with trying to pull the page out of the browser’s cache and the active bits giving it a freaky broken hybrid webpage that it can’t handle.
Does it always crash on those to pages? Or it is merely very very frequent? Do you automagically login to these pages? What happens if you logout and clear the cookies?
Why don’t you just update to a newer version of IE or use a different browser?
I got IE5 installed on the PC when I bought it. It seems to work absolutely fine on all other websites except the two I cited. They are pretty well-known sites, so given the number of people who must have the same version of IE5 as I do, it’s weird I’ve never seen anyone else mention this prob.
I could upgrade to 6.1, but I only have dial-up and doing this online could take a while. Also, if ever I have a more serious crash, the only version I can restore from disk is IE5. And I don’t know that changing to 6.1 would make any difference. The company that sold the PC and supplied all the installed software was a major mfr here in the UK with a good rep at the time, but has since gone out of business, so no help from that quarter.
I haven’t tried any other browsers. I’m used to IE, and it seems to work perfectly on every website in the world, except for this ‘Back’ button glitch on just two sites that I visit.
As for other msgs… I get the msg quoted in my OP, and when I click on it I get the standard M’soft follow-up which is a grey box saying “There was an internal error and one of the windows you were using will be closed. It is recommended that you save your work, close all programs, and then restart your computer.” This tells us nothing, and also recommends a very time-wasting procedure which in this instance is unnecessary (my PC otherwise runs perfectly) and doesn’t solve the problem. Even if I do reboot and re-start, the next time I visit amazon uk or IMDB, the exact same thing happens.
Not weird at all. This bit of info is very good evidence that the problem is unique to your machine. Why, exactly, it is happening may very well never be known. The questions you have to ask yourself at this point is how much does it bother you and what are you willing to do in order to deal with it?
I agree with MC$E. Toss your cookies, clear your cache and if it still happens, think about other options. Personally, I’d download Firefox and be done with it.
Thanks for responses so far, but this mystery still defeats the SDMB. Did the cookies thing, did the cache thing… no difference at all. As I said in my OP, I’m still curious as to how this is even possible, let alone how to fix it.
And it seems that no-one hereabouts as any idea. Given the scope and diversity of questions (even computer geeky ones) which get answered by smart and knowledgeable Dopers, isn’t this remarkable?!
This sounds like memory mismanagement. Have you checked on how your resources are coping, what else is running (that you may not actually want running) and that your swap file is ok.
If you have sufficient physical memory, try killing the virtual memory altogether. If you experience problems, manually allocate virtual memory. Usually double the amount of physical memory will be sufficient. Before allocating the virtual memory, kill all running processes not required to keep the machine running - you should be ok just leaving the systray and explorer, run scandisk and defrag, then allocate the virtual memory, restart and see how that works.
Thank you Myglaren. I appreciate your response, but I just don’t think this is the answer.
How could ‘memory management’ give rise to a problem only on two specific websites: amazon and the imdb? Provided I avoid those two websites, then I can surf the net all the day long day, opening all the windows I like, visiting endless sites (and I visit plenty), pressing ‘Back’ and ‘Forward’ any number of times… no problems, and my PC runs just fine, no probs at all. Even if I’ve got 6 other apps running, including memory hungry apps like Corel Draw or Photoshop.
However, if I do a total switch off clean boot, start up again with only essentials in ‘Start up’, after having cleared cache and cookies, after defrag, and I go on to either of the two sites mentioned… then everything is peachy ***until * ** I use the ‘Back’ key, at which point I instantly get the reported crash. This happens even if hitting the ‘Back’ key is only the 2nd or 3rd thing I do having accessed the site.
No, I think that the problem here is not that no one has any idea; it’s that people have too many ideas. There are lots of things that can go wrong with a browser: lots of strange cases that occur very rarely, malformed HTML/JS/CSS/… that no sane coder would type but that might be mistakenly generated by an automated process, odd caching issues, … I don’t know much about coding browsers specifically, but one class of things that I think could be happening is malformed dynamic content (generated either server-side, as with PHP, or client-side, with JavaScript). (Of course, beyond simple dynamic HTML generation there are extras like Flash which can generate their own TCP/IP traffic and cause their own interesting issues. You could try turning off Flash to see if that’s the problem.)
The “Back” button seems like it should be a simple enough thing: just show me what I was looking at before I clicked! No thought, and no HTTP traffic, required. And if you were willing to just clone the browser’s complete internal state, then it would be easy to save the state stack and just pop off the previous state. But this requires too much memory, so instead a browser tries to remember just enough information to recreate the page. Sometimes it will try to fill in forms you’d completed, but these might be erased (for example, by a “helpful” embedded JavaScript applet). Sometimes the page’s state might contain dynamic content (the ad image you see is often generated as the result of a JS applet, so that every time you view the page you get a different ad); in this case pressing “Back” might cause new GET requests, and some of the returned data might be broken badly enough to kill IE. Unlikely, perhaps, but not at all impossible. If you want to see this in action, get a packet sniffer like Ethereal and try it out. (Many ad-supported sites will do this; www.cnn.com does it for me, for example.) A packet sniffer is probably a good idea if you actually want to solve this problem anyway; it will show you all of the HTTP traffic sent and received by your browser. You’re on dial-up, though; I’ve had problems getting Ethereal to work with all dialup connections. You might see if turning off JavaScript helps; that will at least turn off the client-side dynamic content generation, though it might make the sites more difficult to use.
Clearing cookies once is probably not enough, either. Many websites use per-session cookies to follow you around as you navigate their site; these are often modified after each page view. Since content can be dynamically generated based on cookie values, “Back” can give you different results in these cases as well.
In short, I agree with the previous replies that what you see happening is not at all impossible; there are a lot of things which could be going wrong, though, and the problem is in knowing which is which.
First, go to a “safe” site (Google, say, or anything else that doesn’t crash your browser). Then, go to one of the trouble sites, and follow a link from there to elsewhere on the trouble site. If you just hit “back” now, then you would crash, correct? Now, use the back button pulldown, and try going directly back to Google, skipping over the trouble page.
Second experiment: Go to one of your trouble sites, and then go directly from there to a safe site (Google or whatever) by typing the address into the location field. Then, hit the back button to go back to your trouble site.
Third experiment: Start at a safe site, go to a few pages of one of your trouble sites, and then go to another safe site. Use the pulldown to go directly back to your first safe site.
If the third experiment results in a crash, then I can only conclude that IE is even more idiotic than I had given it credit for, and you should switch browsers. Assuming that the third experiment works, then we look at the other two. If the first experiment fails, then there’s some sort of problem with leaving those pages. If the second experiment fails, then there’s some sort of problem with entering those pages.
I guess if you asked “How does the back button work?” somewhere in your question someone would post something (in IE 5.0 it sends a re-post to the last page visited in your history, I believe, so it looks in your history, finds the page with the latest time stamp, and re-requests the information from that web page server.)
And I guess I wouldn’t attribute it to nobody having an idea. Windows 98SE is 7 years old now and IE 5.0 is about 6(?) years old. IE 5.0 doesn’t support a lot of things that IE 6.1 does and is no longer supported. I’m reasonably certain the problem would pop up at other pages as well, just that you haven’t been there. The largest install I’ve seen of IE 6.1 was about 21 MB - probably take … little math… 83 Minutes or so over 56K
Other browsers are in line with that size. The version of the browser isn’t critical to your success, so instead of spending hours trying to figure out the problem, bite the bullet and download. If you have to pay by the minute as some people in Europe still do, have a friend put the full install of Firefox, Opera, or Netscape on a CD and give it to you - they are free.
IE still doesn’t allow you to download the whole enchillada from MS in one clump, but you can go here and get the upgrade file, which will do the download for you.