IE6.0 XP Sp2 will not allow text in search boxes.

[TBrown-Duke]

I am unable to type or put the cursor in the search text box on any webpage
using IE6.0 on a windows XP home edition. Other web browsers work great.
However, IE just stopped working. Machine is completely upto date with
Microsoft. Unable to try and repair due to not having original cd's. Any
suggestions would be helpful.

[Don Taylor]

"=?Utf-8?B?VEJyb3duLUR1a2U=?=" > writes:
>I am unable to type or put the cursor in the search text box on any webpage
>using IE6.0 on a windows XP home edition. Other web browsers work great.
>However, IE just stopped working. Machine is completely upto date with
>Microsoft. Unable to try and repair due to not having original cd's. Any
>suggestions would be helpful.

I had what might be a similar problem, but I'm just guessing here.

After some reading I had increased the security levels inside IE.
That may or may not be related to the problem. But some time after
that I found that I couldn't type into text boxes on web pages,
like into the text box on www.microsoft.com.

Now prepare yourself because you are almost certainly going to
hear people chant "spyware and viuses, spyware and viruses..."
They tell everybody that, even if you are reporting your computer
is currently on fire, flames are shooting out of it, what to do?

But I haven't had a virus or spyware since 2000 when I tried to
help some poor sob in the office fix his Excel sheet and he passed
me the sheet with a macro virus in it.

But, back to your problem. Something I accidentally found, which
is likely really a bug in IE security. I found I could open up
Notepad, type in my text, copy to clipboard, right click on the
text search box and click Paste and it WOULD let me put text into
a box that way.

So, you might consider whether there is any chance that security
levels might have changed. Lots of web page authors seem to
assume that you have all security levels set wide open and are
running any and all script stuff, and fail in incomprehensible
ways if you aren't doing that. You can also try to right click
paste trick and see if that will let you get text in there, it
is unlikely but it might work and might give a clue.

Somewhere along the way my text box on web page problem went
away but I don't know whether that was related to changing
IE security levels or to someone inside Microsoft realizing
that maybe their own web pages should work when you have high
security levels, since they have finally started saying that
maybe this could be a good idea.

My apologies for the state of what they call software today

[Ramesh, MS-MVP]

Hi,

See if these commands help, from Start/Run:

regsvr32 oleaut32
regsvr32 mshtmled
regsvr32 jscript
regsvr32 /i mshtml

If that does not help, insert your XP CD, and then run "SFC /Scannow" from
Command Prompt.

>> Unable to try and repair due to not having original cd's

I'm sorry you'll need the XP CD to run SFC. If you've applied a Service Pack
separately, you should point to C:\Windows\ServicePackFiles\i386 for updated
system files.

--
Ramesh, Microsoft MVP
Windows XP Shell/User
http://windowsxp.mvps.org


"TBrown-Duke" > wrote in message
...
>I am unable to type or put the cursor in the search text box on any webpage
> using IE6.0 on a windows XP home edition. Other web browsers work great.
> However, IE just stopped working. Machine is completely upto date with
> Microsoft. Unable to try and repair due to not having original cd's. Any
> suggestions would be helpful.