A windows XP system suddenly stopped running ie8.

I tried chrome, and that worked normally.

IE8 would just display an error about DEP (Data Execution Prevention), and then shut down.

I tried disabling the IE8 DEP system, but then I’d get a generic ie8 error.

running ie8 in its “no add-on” mode also didn’t help.

I went into internet options and reset it back to “factory defaults”, but still no go.

I disabled known bad add-ons like the alot toolbar, but still no go.
I eventually started uninstalling the disabled add-ons (eg alot), but nothing would get ie8 to work normally.

At this stage, I was stumped, but I decided to browse through the XP add/remove programs list, and started to remove applications that were not being used.

I uninstalled a lot of junk, but I eventually found that uninstalling sweetIM fixed the problem with IE8

I find this unusual, as sweetIM wasn’t part of the IE addons, yet it must be using IE “under the covers”… so once it corrupted something, then IE stopped working.