When you open a new tab in Internet Explorer 7, does the You’ve opened a new tab message appear every time, and are you unable to turn off this option?

Earlier, I documented a workaround for this problem in the following article:

“You’ve opened a new tab” message appears whenever a new tab is opened

Why does this problem occur?

As this problem happened to one of my systems, I decided to research this issue further. In my another computer which is running the same Operating System/Service Pack/IE version as my main computer, the setting does work perfectly. Whereas in my main computer, a script error occurred when I click the Close button after putting a checkmark near Don’t show this page again.

Little bit of detective work

To begin with, I compared the IE related DLLs (mainly ieframe.dll) in both the systems. However the file size, ordinal Numbers and everything were matching exactly.

At this point, my fellow MS-MVP Robert Aldwinckle gave a good suggestion that I run a script debugger. I immediately downloaded and installed Microsoft Script Debugger, and repeated the steps again. The debugger showed this:

We did not know where this function is located, and how to proceed further.

Turning point

I loaded up the excellent RegMon utility and started monitoring iexplore.exe. RegMon indicated that iexplore.exe read the following registry value:

HKCR\TypeLib\{EAB22AC0-30C1-11CF-A7EB-0000C05BAE0B}\1.1\0\win32

The (default) value data was set as C:\WINDOWS\system32\shdocvw.dll

I ran RegMon in my other system where the option worked fine. This time I traced out the issue. In the working computer, the (default) value data was set as C:\WINDOWS\system32\ieframe.dll

In the subject computer, I changed the (default) value to ieframe.dll, and Voila, the problem was solved.

What are the possible causes?

1. I may have registered shdocvw.dll to fix a different problem after Internet Explorer 7 was installed.
2. Or the Internet Explorer 7 setup might have failed to update the registry.

This problem can be easily reproduced by registering shdocvw.dll using the Regsvr32.exe command in a system running Internet Explorer 7.