BleepingComputer.com: Max Number Of Tabs Or Windows Used

Having a problem I think is related more to Vista than IE7, from what I can find so far...

After browsing for a while, often opening new tabs or windows, the system refuses to open any more, EVEN THOUGH I HAVE CLOSED ALL PREVIOUS WINDOWS.

The number seems to be about 50. I have looked into this and it seems that is the max number Vista allows open at ONE TIME, but that is my limit even though I close windows/tabs after reading. Some counter is not reset, or port freed up??

Only a restart gets things going again, and then it will eventually happen again. I must go down to only one open window to even get the Start/Restart windwo to be able to pop up.

Have an Acer Aspire 5100, 2gig RAM, Vista home, IE7.

Much thanks,
Tom

Contrary to your presumption, I do believe that this problem is related to IE7, rather than the OS. I have encountered this problem on both my XP and Vista machine. My XP machine has 1Gig of RAM and my Vista machine has 2Gigs. I believe that the more RAM you have, the more windows and tabs you can get through before the freeze, because it seems I can do more on my 2Gig machine versus my 1Gig.

Although, it may be Vista related because of the unresponsiveness you mentioned. I wasn't perfectly clear on the part where you said you had to get to the Start/Restart window. Do you mean that your whole computer freezes up? Other programs and all? Because I have only experienced IE7 refusing to work, and it had little to no effect on the other programs I had running at the time.

So, you're saying that once IE7 starts screwing up, you need to restart the whole computer? Or do you just mean that you have to restart IE7?

The problem may be the way IE7 handles the RAM and Page File. Version 7 is relatively new, so it may have memory leaking issues and/or port issues.

You could always just download Firefox 2 and use that! It works beautifully on XP and Vista, even after I've gone through 300+ tabs!

Seconded.

FireFox and Opera are infinitely better browsers than IE, and much more secure.
It is a pity that so many people are brought up on IE and unwilling to change. The small effort required to learn an alternative browser is well worth it. IMHO.

Jon, and others...

The computer doesn't totally 'freeze' but works only with one window. For example if you want to open Word or Excel, you must not have any other windows open or it won't come up. Once browsing in IE 'uses up' the alloted number of windows, anything that needs a new one even if unrelated to the internet, won't load. Its almost like an old DOS machine where you can do one thing at a time.

Its because of this and some other info I found on the net that lead me to think its Vista more than IE, but I would be happy to learn otherwise.

For now, right clicking a link and using "copy shortcut" then paste into an existing window gets around the problem, though is tedious.

I appreciate any advice. I did do the command to reset sockets. No difference.

oneflying, on Nov 25 2007, 09:47 PM, said:

Since I have encountered this problem on my XP machine more than my Vista machine, it leads me to believe that it is IE/explorer.exe related. It really does seem like IE doesn't clean up its memory footprint in the RAM and the Pagefile after you have closed tabs. It is quite strange that you can't even bring up any other program once the "limit" has been exceeded. If you can, I suggest that you exit IE every now and then, to keep the potential overflow down. IE 7 does have the feature that when you hit "X", it will ask you if you want to load the currently open tabs at the next run of IE. Then you don't even have to bookmark anything, it's all right there the next time you open IE. Firefox has the same feature, and it even saves the next and previous pages as well! I find it one of the most useful features of the browsers.

One suggestion I have is to right click on your IE shortcut, and go to the "Compatibility" tab, and click the box to "Run as Administrator". I have not yet tried this, but there is a slight possibility that this may fix the issue.

Jon

I would suggest:
1) Checking the Reliability Monitor and the Event Viewer (particularly the System and Applications logs included inside the Windows log folder)
2) Check Task Manager...Processes tab to verify what's eating up the memory.
3) Use Process Explorer to explore that process and see what it's doing. http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysintern...ssExplorer.mspx