SysFader Hater

I recently encountered the SysFader error within Internet Explorer 8 on Windows 2k3 R2.

This initially worried me because it was within a page I had built that contained some jQuery animation. It turned out it was not just my page though – at least MSN, Amazon, and MajorGeeks caused the same error to appear. That seemed like a decent enough variety to assume it was not just my page.

There are some good posts about the SysFader error out there:

• http://beyondteck.blogspot.com/2006/05/how-to-stop-sysfaderexe-error.html
• http://www.ehow.com/how_5328993_fix-sysfader.html
• http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/ieextensiondevelopment/thread/fd16e2e9-06be-4591-a0f9-b44f16293a82
• http://www.innerexception.com/2007/11/troubleshooting-sysfader-crashes-in.html

This error seems to have been around for a while – third link above is a thread that spans nearly 2 years.

I tried some of the proposed ‘fixes’ out there – with no success. I admittedly did not try that hard on the ones that had me turning off animation effects and 3rd party browser extensions within IE – since 1) I like me some animations & extensions and 2) The animation effects have been working fine for years, why would I suddenly need to turn them off? (No, I don’t fear change at all…)

There is even a post that points the blame at poor innocent MOSS: http://biztalkdev.com/blogs/paulwu/archive/2007/03/09/IE7-Crash-when-accessing-MOSS-2007.aspx This was interesting because the page that initially threw the error at me was MOSS-based. I also DID NOT attempt to disable the OWSSUPP.DLL ActiveX control since it had been working well for a while and as I mentioned earlier, I was seeing the error from other sites that were definitely not MOSS-based.

Even tried reboot – no dice. Scary because that was the second time in the past month that reboot has failed me!

So how I fixed it: Actually, it was pretty easy. I reinstalled Adobe Flash 10. Not sure what the minor version that I had was, but I had updated Flash recently on the affected machine and it was version 10 – so I may have reinstalled the current version – or at most it was a minor version update. Either way, the net effect of reinstalling flash and restarting IE was that the Sysfader error was a nothing but (a) bad memory.

Later SysFader!