I encountered a user who was browsing to a webpage that locked up their computer. I kid you not, we had to do a hard reboot, no ctrl-alt-del anything. She was using IE 7 and there were no fancy-schmancy toolbars on there, but I took a looksee at her add-ons as I have found these to not merely be an issue on occasion but even to be where malware has secreted itself.

I noticed an add-on named "jqsiestartdetectorimpl" which referenced jqs_plugin.dll. That is the Sun Java quickstarter file.

Now one of the problems in the whole realm of computers is that with so much competition, vendors do not care if they break your computer as long as they are on top. Who cares if your computer is slower as long as our product launches a microsecond faster. So you end up with a thousand (okay, I exaggerate) little programs sucking up memory because they each are thinking about numero uno. And no, numero uno is NOT you.

So I disabled that add-on and voila!

Note that many of these do NOT need to run for your stuff to work beautifully. And in this case (and others I have run across) all they do is mess up the browser, and possibly freeze the computer.

One nice thing about IE 7 and 8 is that they have a "no add-ons" mode. You can get to it a few ways

1. Start/Run and type "iexplore.exe -extoff" (sans quotes). Note that you will need to reenable any add-ons that you want since this turns them all off.
2. From the Start menu, to into Accessories / System Tools / Internet Explorer (No Add-ons). This will only disable add-ons for the duration of this session.

Note that #2 is better for troubleshooting since it does not turn them off permanently.

Remember - malware likes to hide here, so keep an eye on these.