So, I've been having troubles with Explorer 11 on windows 7 : it simply doesn't work.

- The "menu" bar is blank.
- Most functions on the rightmost "cog icon" menu are greyed out.
- No reactions to bookmark clicking or url typing.
- The browser's page is blank.

Everythings works fine when I :

- Downgrade to former Explorer versions.
- Start Explorer 11 through the "iexplore.exe -extoff" command.

The mystery (to me) is in the fact that I interpret "-extoff" as a command to disable all addons, but when I do manually disable all addons through the addons manager window, and restart explorer, it still doesn't work. So, what does "-extoff" do that is not accessible through the addon manager ?


Also can we skip the (generally unavoidable) browser contests debates ? To anticipate the questions : I am using widows explorer because : 1) I do not like to use only one browser, 2) chrome is too much google, 3) opera is too much chrome, 4) firefox is what I also use but as said I don't wish to use only one browser, 5) even if i decided to stop using explorer, i would want to decide this while it it working. And all of these are besides the point.


So, any idea on how to fix this explorer 11 issue ? It seems that almost all the addons that I cannot uninstall (instead of simply disabling them) are from microsoft, adobe, oracle, etc... Could the issue still come from them ?

The thing is : they are absolutely all disabled.

I also found, online, suggestions about deleting the ITBarLayout value in the registery base, but I don't really like to tweak these things without knowing exactly what I am doing and why...

And resetting all IE11 settings back to defaults as per http://support.microsoft.com/kb/318378 does also nothing?

No, I have done that a couple of times - that's how I know that the problem doesn't appear on older Explorer versions. But each time I upgrade back to 11, the problem reappears...

... Okay I have finally done this (quite the leap of faith), and it seems to have solved the problem. :-/

Including with all the add-ons reactivated. So, all is fine.

Am still marking your answers as the solution, given that you actually posted to support me.

Aw. Yeah, maybe I should have been less impatient. But I had googled it and found enough occurences of the "delete it" advices (in various contexts) to assume that indeed it would merely restore it to default.

Still, I generally never have any idea, myself, of what deletion "destroys" or "removes for automatic default replacement". So such things are always a tad freaky...

(Also, the good thing is that such investigations are always a nice opportunity for some radical uninstall/disable cleanup...)