Internet Explorer 32-bit Crashing = Dell Driver Fail

Recently I had made some changes to my MDT server, primarily updating my custom WIM’s with the latest Microsoft updates and organizing/updating drivers.

I had a user who needed a new machine sooner rather than later, so I fire up a spare Dell Optiplex 980, boot to the network and deploy the needed image from my MDT server. She had some custom software which needed to be installed that was not a part of the deployment, so I installed and configured those manually.  Using Windows Easy Transfer, I transferred her user data over to the new computer and we were ready to rock, or were we?

I decided to hop on the web to download something and immediately, IE 9 crashes in an infinite loop.  “Internet Explorer has encountered a problem and needs to close”.  Dumbfounded, I try IE 64-bit and it works fine.  I check Event Viewer and the following error is displayed, all the "unknowns" were very helpful:

I try opening IE 9 32-bit in safe-mode(no add-ons), and the crashing continues.  I uninstall Internet Explorer 9 and IE 8 32-bit does the same thing.  This has never happened before and I am getting very frustrated.  I start uninstalling everything and when I get back to no 3^rd party software on the system, IE 32-bit still crashes!  In the meantime, I have our desktop guy run the deployment on an Optiplex 790, and he has the same problem.

Now I am really in a time crunch, thinking maybe IE somehow got corrupted during image capture, I resort to deploying Windows 7 from source(ISO import).  The deployment finishes and confident we are good to go, I click on Internet Explorer(8 this time as I decided to leave 9 out of the deployment for troubleshooting purposes) and IE crashes again!

Finally I burn a Windows 7 CD, install from the CD and bam, IE works.  I get the computer updated, software installed and computer on her desk.  But I still have the problem on my deployment server.

After some browsing on the TechNet forums, I come across a post with a similar problem, except their event viewer logs gave more information than mine.  The problem seemed to be directly related to the AMD video card drivers available on the Dell website!  The resolution was to revert to older Dell drivers, or install the latest drivers from AMD’s website.  So we did this on the Optiplex 790 and Internet Explorer worked like a charm.

Turns out, the latest driver cabs I downloaded from Dell for the 980/790’s had these bad drivers and both systems used them.  Had I run the deployment on a Optiplex 755 with older ATI video cards, I would have known the Image itself was fine.

In the end, I deleted all of the desktop AMD video drivers from my deployment, imported the latest drivers from AMD’s website and our problem is solved.