This past Tuesday Windows Updated pushed IE8 to my Windows XP desktop computer… Since I have my Windows Updates set to Notify I did have the option to opt out of this updated but since I’ve been running it on my Vista Laptop with no issues I figured why not… what could go wrong… LOL…
First problem I noticed was that I could no long print out invoices using MS Money… This apparently is a known issue and anyone interested in reading more about it the MS Money Forum has several threads on it. Apparently MS Money invoice printing and the IE8 final used for Vista and XP don’t play well together. Specifically, if you try to print an invoice to Adobe PDF (my standard method), any printer, or Microsoft’s XPS Document Writer you end up with blank page(s). There are reports of success with Windows 7 RC however, I’m not quite ready to build a new computer… later this year perhaps…
Most ‘fixes’ tell you to uninstall IE8… of course doing so creates a completely different set of problems in that the uninstall/roll back of IE has never gone well. It is better to re-install a backup from before the upgrade and just upgrade any other programs since then – that is if you make regular full back-ups/images of your operating system drive. (Highly recommended!)
I did managed to find two other ‘work arounds’ to use until MS actually decides to fix the problem. The easiest is to print to SnagIt. Snagit is a great screen capture program created by TechSmith. It is very easy to set MS Money’s Invoice printing to print to SnagIt and then once SnagIt has it, SnagIt allows you to package the printing to a pdf which you can either email or print.
Another note on SnagIt – if you have ForceField running, when you go to capture you can only see a white screen as ForceField by design inhibits screen capture due to keyloggers. It is suggested to have ForceField set to only https… I’ve kept mine running and if I run into a site I want to capture from I temporarily turn off ForceField and reopen the site to make the capture…
The other option requires MS OneNote, print to OneNote does work – however getting that into a format that is easy to print properly or send to a client is more work than it is worth if you already have SnagIt…
After getting the one problem sorted out, yesterday I found another… I have a video capture card on my system and use BeyondTV by SnapStream… well IE8 breaks the WebAdmin Program Guide… the guide sort of works (if you don’t mind jumbled times) in compatibility mode (Tools > Compatibility View on the IE toolbar). Apparently version 4.9.2 which is in RC right now fixes this issue so for the time being, I’m sticking with IE8 and the couple quarks I’ve found in hopes that things will be sorted out soon…
So much for thinking this would be a stress free upgrade…