Some people who installed IE8 have written to me to complain about it running very slowly. In a couple of cases, with IE8 running, their systems were completely bogged down. At first, I thought it was a problem with malware or viruses, so I suggested those having problems use an offline virus scanner, such as my bootable Linux thumb drive virus scanner (BLTDVS) toolkit, but this didn't solve the problem.

You're in luck. If you're having problems with IE8 running slow,I found a simple tweak you can try, thanks to Ed Bott over at ZDNet. His article, “Is IE8 really fat and slow?” gives a simple command that may help.The actual command is shown below.

Click Start > Run and enter the following exactly as shown (might help just to cut and paste it):

regsvr32 actxprxy.dll

That re-registers the ActiveX Interface Marshaling Library, an obscure DLL that most people (even Microsoft experts) had never heard about. (Update: 27-Mar: Note that if you try this using Windows Vista, you must do this from an elevated Command Prompt window; type cmd in the Start menu Search box, right-click the Cmd.exe shortcut, and then choose Run As Administrator.)

Restart your computer after you run the command.