Ed Bott's Windows Expertise

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.

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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…

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