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.

Congrats on solving it. Since the value controls the GUI, deleting it was only going to reset it to the default value anyway.

Edit:I tired to post that it would be safe... seems the comment hung if I did. :/

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...)