Its not often that I have bad things to say about Google.

In this case, a customers ie7 had slowed down to slower than dialup speeds (and would often give a webpage not found error).

However, email, ping, messenger, etc all works perfectly.

Her husbands PC also worked perfectly using ie7.

So the problem was only on her PC, and with ie7 specifically.

My first step was to clear the browser cache.

That didn’t work, so the next step was to start ie7 in no add-ons mode (start -> programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Internet explorer (no add-ons) )

And now ie7 worked at full speed.

Since I’ve seen this happen a few time before, I decided to find out exactly which add-on was causing this problem.

Luckily there weren’t many add-ons, so it didn’t take long to find the culprit: the Google toolbar add-on

The problem would always dissappear if the add-on was disabled.

Since the customer actually needed the google toolbar (she had a lot of favorites/bookmarks saved via the google toolbar), I needed to fix it.

The only thing to do was to uninstall (and reinstall) the toolbar. I was sure that the bookmarks wouldn’t be lost (they are saved by google… or maybe locally), but uninstalling the toolbar shouldn’t remove them.

Sure enough, after reinstalling the toolbar, ie7 works normally again, and all the bookmarks are still there.