Hi,

We've been slowly rolling out IE8 (Some machines still had IE4, seriously...) and I've hit a snag. I trialled it myself for a couple of months before upgrading the office managers PC and I'd not found any problems, but after two weeks I got a call from her regarding one of the BT gateways called eCo repair. It's pretty critical to our day to day operations, and 99% of it works fine on IE8 but there's at least one page that doesn't.

We've tried setting "compatibility view" which does fix some minor layout problems, but does nothing to effect this issue. This is the problem:



You're supposed to fill in 5 example numbers, but it's simply not possible to do. The result is that the fault can not be logged, which is clearly not an acceptable situation. This screen shot is in IE8 in compatibility view. It's exactly the same in Firefox, even using IEtab. IEtester doesn't work at all.

The relevant page on the Openreach website says to use Internet Explorer 5.5 and specifically says "it may work with more recent versions of this browser". It worked fine with IE6.

Can anyone suggest a way to make IE 8 compatibility view more, er, compatible? I really don't want to downgrade to IE6, but as far as the manager is concerned I have now "broken her computer" which was "working perfectly" before I messed with it. It's obvious that I can't force BT to fix their website, so I can't really see any alternative.

And before anyone suggests it, no I'm not going to install a virtual machine to run IE6 in. I'd be crucified!

Try a different browser.

Stuff usually works well in FF and Opera, but avoid Chrome at all costs. It hated my phpBB theme (which was IE6 again) that I had on my old forum.

Is it obvious?

Could you not enquire of BT why a service that is being sold in 2010 is reliant on IE 5.5, a piece of software that was released in June 2000, has been obsoleted by Microsoft, hasn't had a service pack since August 2001, hasn't had a security update since 2005 and whose market share is lower than Konqueror 3.5?

As I said in my post, "It's exactly the same in Firefox". It's the same in any vaguely standards compliant browser.


Oh I do intend to "enquire". I don't expect satisfaction though; certainly not with the hours I have to resolve the issue.

Dear sweet merciful god don't.

He might find out how certain products they have and offer to the end user they won't accept until they are at least 2-3 years old, are out of date and pale in comparison to similar products offered in the US. Or how they have promised certain products for 3 years now, the product has been available for 2 of those years and they haven't implemented it, despite version 2.0 being demoed at CES this year and given a guaranteed release date by another customer using the same system, then their competitor made a bespoke version of their product and got it working within that time period and RTM.

That is one section of the product though.

Aarggghh!!

I've uninstalled IE8, and now I've got IE7 which doesn't work either.

I can't uninstall IE7 from add/remove programs.

I've tried installing IE6 and it says "A newer version has been detected. Setup can not continue".

I've tried rolling back, but there are no restore points far enough back.

Any suggestions before I reformat and put Windows '95 on?

Have a read of this thread it may well help.http://www.x404.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=1316

which windows OS are you using if 9x or W2K upto SP1 there is a program called IEradicator which will remove IE from the system and allow you to reinstall an older version of IE on to that system


this is for a 9x and W2K systems only
http://www.litepc.com/ieradicator.html

from the MS data base IE8 removal
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/957700

It's XP SP3. I've removed IE8, but it's left me with IE7.