I upgraded to IE8 (Win XP PRO), and I’ve noticed that sometimes there seem to be stray instances of IE8 in memory. In experimenting, I’ve found some interesting situations in opening/closing IE while I had the Task Manager open so I can see what is going on in memory.
When I open IE8, actually 2 instances are created in memory! If while displaying a website I shift-click to open a link, another instance of IE8 is created in memory (as expected). But here’s where it gets interesting. If I close this lastest window, the instance in memory doesn’t go away immediately! In fact, it stays there for about a minute. If I happen to use shift-click again to open a window before that last instance actually removes itself from memory, it apparently opens the new window using the same instance of IE8 from before. I’ve surmised it does this to save time.
Problems seems to occur, however, if I have opened a 2nd window using shift-click, and then close the first window! Those first instances of IE8 don’t seem to want to go away. They seem to stay there even if I later close the 2nd window! Then often when I go again to open IE, I get 2 windows opening! I also have problems with clicking on a link and IE seems to freeze for awhile.
I couldn’t find anything in MSKB, but even finding IE8 was a challenge. Silly me, I looked in the product dropdown for Internet Explorer, but the only thing I could find was “Internet Explorer 6.0”. Turns out you have to look for “Windows Internet Explorer 8.0”!
