Recently I am quite busy with my work. My timetable is full with meetings, discussion and some documentation work. As usual, the most headache part will be spending time on troubleshooting technical issues. Before you can come out a resolution, you will need to do a lot of research and testing, to ensure the root cause of the problem, and a solid solution which can really settle the issue.

As a technical guy, people will always ask for your favor to help them troubleshoot their computer problems. Sometimes, it is not easy to reject them, especially a request from your boss. Few days ago, my friend told me that he is having problems with his Internet Explorer. When he tries to launch Internet Explorer, it will stop responding for a while and then shut off automatically. However there is no problem for his Firefox. When he simulated the problem to me and captured the event appeared on the screen, I noticed the error logged was “Fault Module Name: msvcrt.dll”. Thus, I tried few steps to resolve this issue.


I tried to search and found out that “msvcrt.dll” is the Windows library file for Microsoft Visual C++ Run Time. This run time component is commonly installed on most of the Microsoft Windows system. I tried to download and re-install Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 on my friend’s machine, unfortunately, there is no luck and the same problem still persist. The second thought that comes to my mind was replacing the particular dll file with the working dll from other computer. I immediately copied the dll from my own computer, and then transfer the file using thumb drive but I wasn’t able to replace or delete that file.

After few tries, I noticed he recently installed a new program and it was Google Toolbar. At the end, I just uninstalled the Google Toolbar and surprisingly, the Internet Explorer was back to normal!

I am not judging Google Toolbar is bad, but if you having performance or technical issues on Internet Explorer, remove and uninstall external toolbar or add-in is a good way to start. This is not the first time I face such similar problem as I cannot remember what was the error that I encountered before, but I do remember the solution was uninstalling one of the external toolbar for Internet Explorer. Anyway, I am using Firefox and it is really more stable than Internet Explorer.