ie5 opens but then vanishes!

[paolow]

can anyone suggest anything? this is happening to a friend of mine and its eating into his pistonheads time. hes got a win 2000 machine and when he opens the browser it disappears from the page but the icon is present in the taskbar, so we know it IS activ, but he cant see it anywhere? ive tried a few things, looking under the taskbar etc and the only thing i can thing of left is to reinstall ie5. not the end of the world. but ill have to talk him through it and if theres a quick fix that any of you know about - im sure that'd be easier!
TIA

[HarryW]

No expert myself but I'd run a virus checker first.

Harry

[paolow]

HarryW said:

No expert myself but I'd run a virus checker first. Harry

hes run norton and it came up clean. also, theres no popup stopper or anything

[gopher]

If you press alt-tab does it appear as an option in the pop-up box? and if so does it re-appear when you select it?

[GreenV8S]

Could this be a problem where the application 'remembers' where on the desktop it is, and automatically reopens in the same place next time? If the position is outside the visible desk top the application seems to have disappeared. This happened to me a long time ago with a different application, if I right-clicked on the task bar and maximised it I could see it but as soon as I restored it to normal size it disappeared. In the end I hunted down the registry settings that recorded its position, and deleted them, the problem never came back.

[paolow]

thanks for the replies, the strange thing is that i spoke to him and told him to alt - tab but he says nothing happens when he does that. very odd. also, i tried to get him to bump his resolution right up to provide more desktop but its on max already. at 1024? can that be right? all a little strange. maybe it might be easier just to reinstall internet explorer.