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 article "You’ve opened a new tab" message appears whenever a new tab is opened in Internet Explorer. But wondered why this problem occurs?

As this problem was seen in one of my systems, I decided to research this issue further. In my another computer which is running the same Operating System, Service Pack, and Internet Explorer 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. 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 showed iexplore.exe reading the following registry value:

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

In the subject computer, the (default) value data was pointing to C:\WINDOWS\system32\shdocvw.dll

I ran RegMon in my other system in which the option worked fine. 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.

Possible causes that I can think of:

  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.

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