Question : Internet Explorer 7 not opening

Up until today I have never had any problems with my Internet Explorer 7. Indeed up until lunchtime today it was fine. This afternoon I went to open it, clicked on the icon and... nothing! Well actually the egg timer appeared for a few seconds then vanished. I opened task manager and could see two entries for iexplore.exe which I terminated. I tried again but the same thing happened. I also noticed that unless I terminated the processes in task manager, other programmes would either take a long time to respond or not respond at all.

I ran a malware scan with malwarebytes anti-malware and it found a few things which I removed but the problem with IE remained. Next I emptied the cache of temp files, cookies etc. but no joy there either.  I then opened Internet Options, Advanced and reset everything to defaults and this time there was a difference. The browser opened but stalled trying to load the homepage of google.co.uk. I closed it down and changed the homepage to Blank and voila! it opened without any problem. I was then able to enter any URL you care to mention and it responded perfectly. I also opened multiple tabs and they worked fine also.

Encouraged by this I created a shortcut to google.co.uk and tried opening the browser from that. Guess what? It stalled again trying to open the page. Again I reset the browser and opened it with a blank page and all was well. No problems at all surfing anywhere. I then changed the homepage to MSN and again the browser stalled on opening.

I have also tried running it without add-ons and disabling my anti-virus programme. Neither of these had any effect on the problem

As you can see I have been pretty thorough. Just when it appears to be working fine again, I only have to do something like making the homepage a URL or try opening the browser from a link and it falls down again.

The computer is running XP SP3.

Please help!!

Answer : Internet Explorer 7 not opening

Hello, ube100,

wrt question #2:
 (afaik) you can cast null to any type you like.  It is still null.  That is, I believe the casting is unnecessary, but probably does no harm.

wrt question #1:
In general, whether a function can accept null as a value (and what it does with a null value) is up to the function.  Sorry, but I don't know the details for the PrepareCommand function.  However, I would guess  that passing in a null for transaction would mean that the command would NOT be executed as part of a transaction.

Cheers,
Randy