I fully intended to blog yesterday, but before I did, I thought it might be fun to install the Alexa toolbar.

I was wrong.

For some reason, the toolbar clashed with something else I was running on IE (maybe the Google Toolbar, or Instant Buzz) and all hell broke loose on my computer.

IE still works — sort of — but refuses to show any javascript, and doesn’t show pages the way they’re supposed to look.

So, I used the uninstaller to get rid of Alexa.

But it didn’t. The DLLs are still there, and so is the problem.

So, I Googled and found out what registry entries I was supposed to remove, and which DLLs I could get rid of, and did that.

Still no luck.

So, I thought, maybe it’s a spyware problem. I ran AdAware, Spybot Search and Destroy and Windows Defender. No problems found other than Alexa cookies. I removed those, but it didn’t make a difference.

I also tried reinstalling IE, with no effect.

As it stands now, I still am having problems with IE. It’s working a little better, but Javascript still doesn’t display (I have it set to display, but it gives a javascript error for every script — including Adsense). This wouldn’t bother me if it only affected IE, since I’m a Firefox user anyway, but EVERY windows app that uses the Windows Explorer library fudges up now… and you’d be amazed at how many apps are involved. Even my HP Scanner software makes me click on error messages before it starts running.

I, thankfully, have a ghosted hard drive without Alexa that I can replace, but I’d rather just fix this and save the ghost for a REAL emergency. However, I’m beginning to doubt that it can be fixed. I’ll try removing ALL the toolbars from IE, then reinstalling IE again, and maybe do some more registry fiddling.

But for now, I’m going to just stick with my Linux computer for a while. It’s a steady ol’ beast, and hasn’t been rebooted since sometime last year. I can’t tell you how comforting that is right now.