McAfee Security Center blank window

[JackYan]

I’m with you on this, Peter. Firefox is my preference. Microsoft has not made a good browser since IE5 in my opinion and the speed advantage people talk about with IE9, I really cannot see on the laptop. My issue with Chrome is Google’s privacy gaffes (e.g. http://jackyan.com/blog/2011/05/google-ads-preferences-manager-issue-conrmed-by-nai/ and that’s not the only one)  which gives me no faith in its products. I agree with the Firefox add-on problem, but, on the other hand, I have been trying the Nightly builds and they have been largely stable. I found quite a serious bug in 4, so I pushed it in the developer forums and, lo and behold, it actually was fixed for release.

I remember your mentioning the beta early on.

Microsoft tells me there is another round of updates on February 14, so hopefully they will address this issue. If not, it does appear that waiting ten months might be one solution, since that worked on Vista!

[exbrit]

Let's hope time heals this one 😉

[JackYan]

Peter and Tony: good news. I’ve fixed it.

Culprit: missing system fonts. My clue was in the Vista machine where IE9 decided to start working this week. All of a sudden Arial Narrow, which was not on there before, was.

Our policy is to delete Arial on every system when it comes in here, as there is no need for it in polite society. It looks like IE9 can’t live without it. No Arial, no display. It falls to pieces.

If this isn’t a browser bug, I don’t know what is.

What we have done, since even displaying Arial will make people go blind at this firm, is create four fonts and called them Arial, Arial Italic, Arial Bold and Arial Bold Italic. They were saved as OTFs.

All I did was install the four fonts but they actually won’t ever be used. Another thing we do from day one is to put in Fontsubstitutes into the registry, so Arial is disabled or substituted with Helvetica or Liberation Sans (from Linux). Arial still is substituted, but there are now simply four fonts called Arial in the registry that now makes IE9 happy.

The really, really crazy thing here is that IE9 actually won’t load any font that has a non-TTF suffix (also a bug, since Windows supports TTF, OTF, and PS1 natively). Remember, our Arials are OTFs so IE9 doesn’t even use them! But as long as it “knows” Arial is nearby, IE9 finds comfort and feels OK to load pages.

It’s a crazy bug, I know. No other browser is dependent on certain fonts being present. They run regardless. Microsoft browser typography has been crap since IE6.

[exbrit]

That's great news and bears out my opinion that things can malfunction if you mess with the system.  So anyone else thinking of removing fonts, beware.

[JackYan]

I might have to get myself involved in 10 beta to remove the font dependency!

I’d be fine if it was Calibri or another one of their sans serifs, but Arial?!

[exbrit]

Maybe that's what the SecurityCenter uses, however that's just a wild guess.

I think it's safe to say that this problem may well be caused in part at least, by the the installation of new fonts with possibly same names as existing fonts See this page: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-CA/windows-vista/Fonts-frequently-asked-questions

Or by the removal of a font that is used by an application's GUI.   Setting a default font in a browser doesn't mean it wont read all other fonts in the Windows arsenal.

Best not to mess with Windows defaults in this regard.

Message was edited by: Ex_Brit on 03/02/12 3:17:27 EST PM

[JackYan]

Hi Peter: it was the actual deletion, or my deletion of the font locations, that caused IE9 to go all to pieces in my case. But you are right that two fonts with the same name, with different formats, can confuse Windows Vista and 7, as I have seen this happen.

SecurityCenter is accessing the fonts I called Arial, so you are correct. However, there are numerous other programs that don’t access Arial—e.g. the Microsoft Gadget I have for currency, which uses Verdana—that will also go to pieces!

It’s Microsoft’s “security blanket programming”: it just likes knowing Arial is nearby but actually doesn’t access it!

I’ll still render (the real) Arial inaccessible no matter what I do, mind. It’s a British design forced into Swiss proportions, the typographic equivalent of getting Gordon Brown into Roger Federer’s underwear. There are some things that one does not need.

Message was edited by: JackYan on 2/3/12 3:09:48 PM CST

[exbrit]

LOL understood and I love that comparison....!!

[ElectricPotato]

Chalk up another success by uninstalling IE9.

This issue has been driving me nuts for months but I always had bigger fish to fry.

Figured I would spend some time on it this week and get it fixed.

Yesterday, I did a chat session with McAfee tech support - told them of the white box issue. The guy remote controlled my PC and uninstalled and reinstalled McAfee.

Seems odd now that I've found this thread...because he must've known that wouldn't fix it.

Anyways, I tried all the suggestions  - though I couldn't get IERegFix.bat to run correctly - it just says:

Please wait for the registration process to complete.

This make take several minutes.

2 was unexpected at this time.

So I edited the file so that it wouldn't check for my IE version and would just register those DLLs, but it didn't really help any.

Uninstalling IE9 was the only way I could get it to work.

That's okay - I don't use IE unless I have to but I'm sure I'll be hassled by pop-ups that windows updates are available.

[exbrit]

ElectricPotato, had you uninstalled any Windows Fonts or installed a new set by any chance?    This has been found to be the culprit.    That's why the Mods & McAfee staff could not repro it because none of us had done that.