Even when I’m not using it, Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 appears to be trying very hard to make sure that I can’t ignore it. Recently installed after Microsoft decided to push out IE7 to users who, like me, refused to install Windows Genuine disAdvantage, I thought that it would be relatively harmless. Although I wasn’t planning on using it much anyway (at least not outside of the IEtab plugin), IE6 certainly needed an update and I thought it couldn’t hurt. Well, I was wrong.<\/p>\n
First, the backstory. On Kaleidoscope, my venerable 2004-era desktop computer, I have a 4-disk RAID 0 stripe. At the time, this choice made a lot of sense, because I used the computer primarily for video editing and playing video games. Speed, not data security, was the primary concern. I kept all of my important documents on Kleinoscope, my laptop at the time, which I occasionally backed up.<\/p>\n
However, Kleinoscope died<\/a> a rather horrific death<\/a> several months ago, and before the arrival<\/a> of Graphitica<\/a>, I ended up using Kaleidoscope for productivity considerably more than I had originally anticipated. Combined with several scary refusal-to-boot episodes, I decided that data security had to become a higher priority. So I headed to Fry’s and created Nexus, a file server with a couple of 750 gigabyte hard drives<\/a>. I decided to transfer all of the documents I had been storing on Kaleidoscope to Nexus and just set that up as my default Documents storage location. Over a gigabit connection, response was snappy and everything worked great. Until I let IE7 install itself.<\/p>\n At that point, whenever I clicked on my Documents folder, I first received a pop-up warning dialog:<\/p>\n This page has an unspecified potential security risk. Do you want to continue?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Well of course I wanted to continue. I wanted to access my documents, and there was of course no potential security hazard, specified or not, in my doing so. I didn’t specifically link the appearance of this dialog to the installation of IE7 at the time, but I did find it annoying. Today, I was feeling a bit petulant and decided to see what would happen if I clicked “No” to the dialog’s inane question instead of my customary “Yes.” Well, I didn’t get to see my files, and my desktop decided that it was busy for the rest of time. Although performance appeared to be unaffected, whenever I hovered my mouse over the desktop, I was treated to an hourglass icon. A good 30 minutes later, the icon is still persistent. Well, this travesty motivated me to fix the problem once and for all. So I did the most anti-Microsoft thing imaginable: I Googled it. And true-to-form, Google delivered some excellent results.<\/p>\n