IE 10 Desktop toubles.

Happy New Year!

Well today, I've been working on this ASUS laptop for a friend of a friend. It originally had issues with the Windows Store and downloading apps, but I easily fixed that.

Now the problem I have is with IE 10 on the Desktop. It does not work. What happens is when it opens, the error prompt of Internet Explorer has stopped working. It looks for a solution, then says to close the program and notify you if a solution is found.

What I've done is pretty much everything in the book, STD scans with Windows Defender and Kaspersky Internet Security 2013, disabled EVERY add-on, reset IE settings, cleared out the temp files locally in Windows and within IE, sfc /scannow several times, gone and killed out any third party add-on extensions (one from Intel), just everything. I'm trying to do a refresh or even a reset at this point with Windows, but EVERY time I do so it just restarts and says it encountered a problem or it just doesn't go through. This is being done on the administrator account. I've also went a made a separate user account and checked it, still the same. I've also gone into Programs and Features to disable IE, restart, re-enable, and restart Windows. Nope.

I also went and booted Windows into Safe Mode with Networking, surprisingly that worked. IE 10 on the Desktop had no troubles.

IE immersive has no issues whatsoever.

I'm thinking some program is obviously screwing things up since it worked fine in Safe Mode. I'm wanting to reset or refresh Windows as that would just be best and easiest. But that's not working correctly either for some reason.

Any help appreciated!

Are they or have they installed Chrome?

Try uninstalling and reinstall through Windows Features.

Do not install Chrome. Yes, Chrome breaks IE.

Also, if you are doing a full reset and wiping out everything, you need to start installing software and testing IE after each one to see what is breaking it.

If it is broken from the get go, then something is hanging on to something, you may want to just format the drive and start fully from scratch.

They did, in an effort to try and troubleshoot internet connecting as everything else connected to the internet, except the Windows Store and Desktop IE. First thing I did was to uninstall that filth and reset defaults back to IE.

I'm at that point of wiping down the drive of data, thoroughly formatting, reinstalling the appropriate device drivers from ASUS, taking screenshots of the Start Screen to rearrange tiles and what programs to reinstall. This is maddening.

Now, I need to track down an .iso of Windows 8 core edition and reinstall fresh. Be gone crapware! Be gone!

Interestingly enough, I was checking the partitions in Disk Management and saw that it reports that all three OEM partitions, the recovery, and the UEFI partition are all empty. This would explain why I can't enter into the UEFI shell from the BIOS, and why resetting or refreshing Windows doesn't work, the files aren't there...