domenica 27 maggio 2012

IE8 misbehaves on virtualized Windows XP SP3 inside Virtual PC 7.0.2

A few months ago I subscribed to Microsoft TechNet Standard.

Today I installed Microsoft Virtual PC 7.0.2 onto my glorious PowerBook G4 1.67 GHz/1.5 GB, to test Windows XP Professional SP3.

The installation took quite a long time but in the end all went fine. Running XP on a PowerPC G4 is not the fastest experience, but acceptable anyway.

Next step, I updated Internet Explorer from version 6 to version 8.

I run IE8-WindowsXP-x86-ENU.exe, restarted the virtual machine, launched IE8, went along the first time run questionnaire. I don't like automatic updates, so I opted for not to let the system check for updates for IE.

Everything was in place. Time to test internet sites. I typed in the first URL that came to mind, hit return and waited for the page to load. I could see, on the status bar, the loading page progress, but I got nothing but a blank page. Tried a couple of other URLs. Same results.

What I discovered after some Google searches was that, I wasn't alone.
At first, the only resolutive suggestion I found was to uninstall IE8 and install IE7. I didn't like the idea. Tried harder and I came across this MacWindows.com post.

Now I knew that an IE patch would have fixed the issue. But which one?
Back to Google search engine I entered "Cumulative IE8 updates" into the search box. As expected, I got in return a plethora of links. I went for the first one in the list 


and, YES, that did the trick :-)