WTF is up with browsers lately??

Here's a long story that you may have heard recently...

A friend of mine downloaded IE7 and IE started giving him connection errors, as if he had no connection to the internet, except AIM still worked, and so did Mozilla.... untill he updated it...

So then he had two browsers giving him connection errors, even though the network was fine, pings, games, IMs, all fine.

He ended up having to reinstall windows.

So then I accidentally update to IE7 when downloading windows updates, and the same thing happens. I go thru about 2 days of not giving a flying frick because I use mozilla. Wouldn't you know it, today, same with mozilla, it asks me to update, I do, it starts getting connection errors.

I can't tell you how much crap this has put me through. I finally got the information I needed to revert to an earlier version of IE, but mozilla won't revert. I uninstall and reinstall old versions, but when they come up they have everything the way I left it on my updated version, plugins and all, and of course, a connection error.

I've been planning a system overhaul for a while, so I don't really need a solution, but I just want to know if anyone else has seen this happen, because it looks like it would be a widespread problem, but I haven't seen or heard jack about it.

Are both the major browsers experiencing an equal amount of ineptitude in programming? Has ANYONE besides me and my friend had this same problem?

Haven't seen anything like that yet. I've had a lot of looks at IE7
on the company's laptops. Our laptop users have admin privileges
and several have installed Seven. I've successfully uninstalled it
on a handful of units from the Add/Remove Programs feature in the
Control Panel. I was prompted thru some warnings (now forgotten)
upon uninstalling, but everything turned out OK.

Maybe there was some spyware or an internet accelerator of some
kind that mediating the connection somehow. Did the network settings
look OK?

I would never be able to prove what I'm going to say about IE7 but what happened is more that coincidental because it happened on 2 systems. One that I had just finished reloading all of the OS and software on the disk.

Everything was working fine and then after the IE7 upgrade things stopped working so great. It managed to screw up Firefox as well. Uninstall IE7 and set the machine back to the restore point prior to IE7 and then everything works again.

I went in to the MS update config for each computer (5 at the house) and checked the box to ignore that update. I wish I could get Yahoo to stop advertising it on their site.

I think we'll sit out IE7 for a while.

I'm running IE7 on this laptop, side-by-side with both Firefox and Opera,
no problems. None, except that it's slower then IE6. It's not even my
primary browser.

The problems we've been having at work with IE7 is it's not recognizing
our current server certificates, thus confusing users. The problem's
largely confined to our intranet. Another problem for users is the new
look and disappearance of the file menu along the top. Users just aren't
picking up the new icon scheme very quickly.

You're going to be seeing more and more of IE7. Maybe we should get
used to it. I think it's going to be fine. I still prefer 3rd-party browsers
though.

at home IE7 updated fine no issues
at work we have issues across the block
having to get users to go back to IE6

so far as we can tell, it's proprietary S/W that doesn't 'like' IE7
but it does work on some
user D/B is 200 000 + in size, so we expected some problems