Greetings. While I do not yet have enough information to characterize this as a widespread problem, I wanted to issue a heads-up that I'm seeing 100% failure rates on installations of the new Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 on local machines here.

MS is pushing IE7 down as a "high priority optional update" in the current Windows Update cycle. On the XP machines where I've attempted this install (varying hardware platforms, all validated and fully updated SP2 systems), the installation process appears to go smoothly, but any attempts to run IE7 afterwards fail.

There are two different failure modes. In some cases, attempts to start IE7 simply result in "hourglass" then exit. In other cases, the systems appear to hang in hourglass and require a hardware reset to reboot. I do not yet know the underlying factors causing this situation on these multiple systems.

The process to uninstall IE7 (via Add/Remove Programs) has worked quickly and apparently properly in all cases so far to restore the systems to IE6 along with all previous settings.

This is pretty much all that I have so far, and I would welcome reports from anyone else seeing similar problems with IE7.

I thought that it was worth putting out this warning now, since many persons do depend on proper operation of IE (my browser of choice is Mozilla Firefox, but there are some applications that will only work properly under Internet Explorer, unfortunately).

I'll provide more info as available and appropriate. Thanks.

--Lauren--