IE long pause

February 3, 2014 9:44 PM

I made the mistake of upgrading to IE-11 when it hit Windows Upgrade, and like many other people noticed that it often takes a long time to start running.

It's like it is trying to access something and takes 30 seconds before timing out and then loading my home page (off a server on my LAN), when I first start running it -- and not every time. So after a couple of days I got fed up and uninstalled it, and retreated back to IE-10.

Unfortunately, the long pause is still there. I have to assume that IE11 didn't uninstall cleanly. Does anyone know how to make IE stop doing that? (I'm not interested in changing to Chrome or Firefox or Opera or etc.)

posted by Chocolate Pickle to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

This is not IE 11-specific, but I always felt that setting a blank homepage made IE feel like it started up much faster -- almost as if it started to try to load the homepage before it was fully ready, so it took an especially long time to load the first wave of content. So I would set my homepage to "about:blank". That may be worth a shot?
posted by misterbrandt at 8:01 AM on February 4, 2014

Response by poster: I just noticed that while a first instance of IE is hanging, if I start a second one it responds immediately.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 6:11 PM on February 13, 2014

Response by poster: I found an answer online: go into the IE settings under Connections->LAN settings and uncheck "Automatically detect settings".
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 1:41 AM on June 18, 2014

Mod note: Final update from the OP:

I decided to let MalwareBytes scan my system and it found that I was infected by an obscure ad virus called "Hicosmea". With that removed, the delays are gone too.

posted by cortex (staff) at 8:51 AM on January 29, 2016