IE8 slow? Maybe this tweak will help

Update 28-March: As I said in the original intro to this post, I was reluctant to publish this tweak, because I have absolutely no explanation for why it should work. If someone else had posted this, I would have assumed it was snake oil and would have been extremely skeptical. As skeptical as Rafael Rivera, even.

Actxprxy.dll is one of the core libraries for Internet Explorer (along with a few others such as Urlmon.dll and Mshtml.dll). If it’s not properly registered, IE won’t work at all. And re-registering it should never be necessary except in extreme circumstances.

Having said all that, I can only point to the experience I reported in the post linked below, which has since been confirmed by others in comments and e-mails. Are they all experiencing placebo effects? That’s possible, I guess. It’s also possible that some third-party software or add-on is somehow screwing up this DLL and its associated registry settings. I have contacted some engineers at Microsoft to see if they can shed light on the issue and will follow-up after I hear from them.

—–

Over at ZDNet I just published the results of some performance testing I did involving the current crop of browsers. During the course of my research, I stumbled across a tweak that I was at first hesitant to publish. After thinking carefully about it, I decided to do so. I’m glad I did. I have now heard from easily a dozen people via e-mail and in comments who say the improvement in performance for them is amazing.

Please read the original post (Is IE8 really fat and slow?) to get the full background. If you’re experiencing problems with IE8 being slow to load pages, especially when multiple tabs are involved, this might be worth a try. Because this tweak is simply registering a DLL that should have been registered as part of the IE8 installation, there is no harm that can come from trying this.

Here are the instructions.

FOR WINDOWS XP

1. Click Start, then click Run.

2. In the Run dialog box, type cmd and press Enter.

3. In the Command Prompt window, enter this text and press Enter:

regsvr32 actxprxy.dll

4. Restart your computer.

FOR WINDOWS VISTA/WINDOWS 7

1. Type cmd in the Start menu Search box.

2. Right-click the Cmd shortcut that appears at the top of the search results list, Under Programs, as shown here.

3. Choose Run As Administrator.

4. In the Command Prompt window, enter this text and press Enter:

regsvr32 actxprxy.dll

5. Restart your computer.

If this works for you, let me know in the comments below…

82 Thoughts on “IE8 slow? Maybe this tweak will help”

Andrew Voss on March 28, 2009 at 5:18 am said:

did as suggested / did accept it as a command on vista
homepremium os
Richard on March 28, 2009 at 5:45 am said:

Ed:
I followed your script for Vista, except I did not reboot. I really hate doing that. It does not seem to matter. IE8 is now running much faster.
Thanks.
Richard
kristalsoldier on March 28, 2009 at 7:05 am said:

I tried it, but I get an error message…am on Vista SP1
Lew on March 28, 2009 at 7:17 am said:

will this work for IE7 also
Ed Bott on March 28, 2009 at 7:21 am said:

Krisalsoldier, what error message are you getting? Please note that you must run this in an elevated command prompt.
kristalsoldier on March 28, 2009 at 7:36 am said:

Sorry…ran as Admin (I guess that is what you mean by ‘elevated’)…it worked….now whether it made IE8 faster is another matter…! I don’t see, rather perceive any significant difference…but thanks Ed, for the tip…now I wish you had a tip to make scrolling smoother with IE8…particularly using the Logitech Setpoint software!
PaulIw25 on March 28, 2009 at 7:42 am said:

I tried using the command as you specified on my 9 yr. old Toshiba Tecra 8200 that runs Windows XP Home Edition SP3. As soon as I hit enter after typing in regsv32 actprxy.dll I got the following error message:

LoadLibrary(“actprxy.dll”) failed-The specified module could not be done.

I just this means I will be stuck with a slow IE8.
kristalsoldier on March 28, 2009 at 7:49 am said:

Ed…apologies if this question is in the wrong place…b ut for n00bs like me, can you perhaps state clearly which of the four mainstream browsers are the safest for everyday browsing? The options are: IE8, FF (latest stable build); Safari (latest stable build) and Opera (9.64, this I know because I use it all the time…till IE8 came out, that is!)…this would be a great help!

Thanks!
Dan on March 28, 2009 at 7:52 am said:

I assume registering the DLL is only required once just per system. Not once per user account.

On the three XP machines I installed to, one has a significant problem. I already rolled back to IE7 once yesterday, and I’m about to do it today. My problem seems different from what you describe: IE8 is extremely slow to launch. IE8 crashes when I try to close it without waiting for the complete launch.

This is my parent’s computer. It hasn’t had a re-install of XP Pro since I built it in 2005. (It was running IE8 RC1 no problem prior to this upgrade.) I will try the reset and ‘no add-ons’ operations you describe.

I’ll probably live without IE8 on that computer until it’s delivered via the normal Tuesday upgrade. Thanks for the help!
Ed Bott on March 28, 2009 at 8:18 am said:

Paul, check your typing again. Looks like you left a letter out. It’s actxprxy.dll, not actprxy.dll.
Claus Valca on March 28, 2009 at 8:29 am said:

@ Rick -

RE: “It would be interesting if people could post whether or not the DLL was registered on their system before taking this step, but I haven’t found a simple way of determining that.”

I’m very curious about this as well. It would be beneficial to know how many actual cases of the unregistered dll are found before applying the fix..

For a very simple and free GUI-based way to check to see which dll’s are registered, I recommend using Nir Sofer’s RegDllView tool:

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/registered_dll_view.html

Just scroll over to the “Name Only” column and sort on that field. Should be easy to pick out the target DLL that way in the list.

It also can provide the “last registered date” and file date/version information. Also good things to know in advance while troubleshooting this issue.

That should give everyone the info they need before running the fix.

It was registered just fine on my XP/Vista systems that had been upgraded to IE8.

On the other-hand, it might also be reasonable that somehow the registration is present but corrupted. I’ve seen that issue pop up a few times across various troubleshooting posts.

See MS Help and Support Article ID: 555027 (for XP but should apply to Vista as well)

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555027

In fact according to this KB, it is recommend to first attempt to unregister the following DLL’s before re-registering them.

“Note: Please try first to register the urlmon.dll and actxprxy.dll and restart Internet Explorer.”

Cheers.

–Claus V.
Wilf Morrison on March 28, 2009 at 9:03 am said:

Worked great! Now I don’t get the spinning endlessly syndrome and have to shutdown multiple instances of IE. (I have Vista 64)
Dan on March 28, 2009 at 11:25 am said:

Follow up to my previous post. I tried a reset of the IE8 settings to no avail. Uninstalling IE8 restored the system to normal speed.

The new IE slowed user logon an extra 20 seconds in addition to being slow to launch itself. I wonder what the deal is. I suppose I could reinstall IE8 RC1, but I won’t bother. My parents are set up to use Firefox anyway.

I spent a lot of time messing with this. It wasn’t a total wash, as I took the opportunity to uninstall programs cluttering up their add/remove control panel. I removed Windows Live Essentials, among other things.
Russ on March 28, 2009 at 11:35 am said:

I tried the ‘tweak” unfortunately it made no difference. IE8 still very slow and periodically “stops responding” just like IE7 did on vista
Ed Bott on March 28, 2009 at 11:50 am said:

Russ, if you were having problems with IE7 crashing before upgrading to IE8, my guess is that you have a conflict with another program or an add-on. I recommend that you try running in no add-ons mode to see if the problem goes away temporarily.
Rick on March 28, 2009 at 12:04 pm said:

@Claus, thanks for the tip. I should have thought to look on Nirsoft, since that site is a goldmine for tools like this, right up there with Sysinternals.

Looks like mine was registered on the day I installed Win7, but like you say, there can be faulty registrations, so this yes/no information maybe isn’t that helpful unless some people can show it’s not registered at all.

Note that the article didn’t mention anything about unregistering first, but I’ve seen that advice before for various DLLs.
Arnav on March 28, 2009 at 1:09 pm said:

Hi Ed! I thing, alon with IE being fat, the biggest problem I find with IE is it requires too much time for new tabs( or windows) to instantiate. So please, if you can help me on this, as it is really very irritating to see a new tab taking 3-4 seconds to load.
Glenn Blinckmann on March 28, 2009 at 8:14 pm said:

I also have no clue why this is working, but the difference is amazing. If it’s the placebo effect, order me up another case of placebos!
tatlo on March 28, 2009 at 10:56 pm said:

Hey Ed,

Please take a look at this idiot.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-19518_3-10206506-238.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

5 minutes to shut down???
claud on March 29, 2009 at 4:38 am said:

IE team said that registering actxprxy.dll is dangerous, don’t do it !!!!!!!!!!