Internet Explorer 8 keeps crashing while not being used

Question

Since I "upgraded" to MS IE 8, I have this strange behavior that in the middle of doing whatever things (like reading messages on SuperUser.com in Firefox), I suddenly get an error message from IE:

Internet Explorer has stopped working

When clicking on the "stop the app" I get a dialog box with:

Runtime error 217 at 000E900B

The address changes from case to case.

But why is that even happening? I'm not even USING MS IE 8 at this point in time! (and haven't ever launched it since I booted my PC).

When I check the event log, I see this error message here:

Faulting application IELowutil.exe, version 8.0.6001.18702, time stamp 0x49b3ad28, faulting module kernel32.dll, version 6.0.6002.18005, time stamp 0x49e038c0, exception code 0x0eedfade, fault offset 0x0001e124, process id 0x92c, application start time 0x01ca06a05fbe1ff0.

What is "IELowutil.exe" ? Can I turn it off somehow?

It will show up like clockwork every time I have rebooted my PC – sometimes after 2 or 3 hours, sometimes after 5 minutes – no pattern to it (at least I don't see any). And I'm not even really using IE8 at this point when the error pops up … odd.

Anyone seen this, too, and found a solution?

Answer 1

This article explains the history and the reason behind IELowutil.exe. It is basically used to allow IE to share cookies between different integration levels, specifically protected mode. This MSDN article explains it at length.

From a connect bug report the IELowutil stays running for 5 minutes after IE is closed, and this is by design. I would suspect that there is an application you are using that is referencing IE in some way which is forcing IELowutil open.

There could potentially also be an addon that is causing the crash. From the limited information I can find on the newsgroups this was a problem with the Beta and was fixed in the RTM. Maybe check that you've loaded the latest release version?