Here's yet another story about strange and quirky things happening for supposedly no reason. (It turns out there is a reason, but why Microsoft would think that a user would know this intuitively is beyond me.) So many things that seemingly 'go wrong' in Vista that are actually caused by the 'enhanced security features' Microsoft incorporated into Vista to protect users from viruses and other attacks while connected to the Internet.

As a preface to the story, let me briefly explain one of these 'protection enhancements' called "Data Execution Prevention" or "DEP". Data Execution Prevention (DEP) is a security feature  that is intended to prevent a program from running in a place in your computer's memory that is not usually intended to run programs. This helps prevent certain exploits of your system. However, there are some programs that need to use this 'protected' area legitimately, and this is where the problems begin.

And now back to the story--when browsing to some web sites, I noticed that Internet Explorer would crash and I would sometimes get a warning something to the effect of 'DEP or Data Execution Protection had to close the program to protect me'. I was already somewhat familiar with DEP because of some other problems I experienced previously, so I decided to use the same fix--add Internet Explorer to the list of programs that would not be protected by DEP. (DEP protects programs from executing in certain memory areas that are considered off-limits for safety reasons.)

So, I proceeded to unprotect Internet Explorer and try navigating to the site that was giving me all the problems. CRASH! I was stumped, but since it was only this one website that I really wasn't that concerned if I got to or not, I just ignored the problem.

A few days later I decided to install a new browser add-in that allows me to check spelling in on-line form fields--I had used this program (ieSpell) for many years in Windows XP and highly recommend it if you are as spelling challenged as I am; but for whatever reason, didn't install it when upgrading to Vista and was missing it. Installing programs on Vista has started to become an anxiety inducing activity just wondering what errors might be encountered during the install; or after devoting all the time to install the program, the reward of seeing 'install completed' be reduced to disappointment when the newly installed program won't open. Never-the-less, I downloaded the program and installed it and the install went fine. (I've learned that when installing programs on Vista you need to right click on them and choose the option 'Run As Administrator' to increase your chances of the install being successful--this is even if you are logged on with an account with administrative privileges.

With eager anticipation I opened Internet Explorer, went to a site that had a form I could test it on and CRASH!

I didn't know if I was more sad or angry at this point, but my mind hearkened back to the other problems that were sometimes solved by 'unprotecting' programs in DEP Manager. So I tried adding ieSpell to the excluded list and went back and tried using it again. CRASH!

Now what. I tried Googling the problem, but nothing. I tried the ieSpell user forums, nothing. It's hard searching when you don't know exactly what you are looking for. So again, I put the problem on the back burner and just decided to wait--sometimes waiting has a way of presenting solutions. A few days later, I tried searching again and low and behold--I ran across an article that addressed all of the problems I was experiencing with my browser crashing.

It turns out that any pages that had Java in them was the culprit of my original crashes. DEP was the answer, but not the DEP Manager located in the control panel. It turns out that Internet Explorer has it's own DEP and needs to be disabled too. You can find this option under TOOLS | INTERNET OPTIONS | ADVANCED | Then scrolling down to SECURITY and un-checking "Enable memory protection to help mitigate on-line attacks". However, this option is grayed out and not available to check or un-check unless you use that little trick of right clicking on the program icon and selecting 'Run as administrator'.

As soon as I unchecked that little box, all of my browser crashing problems were cured. Java worked, ieSpell worked and who knows what other programs in the future will work and spare me the aggravation of a crash that could have happened. Life is good. I have uploaded a screen shot of the tools window so you can see box that needs unchecked.

Can you tell if I opened my browser using the right click 'run as administrator' trick when I took this screen-shot?

I want to also credit the original person that discovered this problem and provided the solution: http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r20213564-Re-Vista-Java-causing-DEP-in-IE7 Thank you Woody.