Taming Your Multiple IE Standalones
January 19th, 2007
Taming Your Multiple IE Standalones
Most of the conditional comment behaviors may be restored to the standalones by performing a simple one time edit to your registry. It consists only of renaming a particular key, which currently says IE, so that it says zIE.
To do this, click the Start button, click Run, and type in “regedit.exe”. This launches the registry editor, where you may then navigate to the desired registry key. The target key, called IE, may be found under HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Version Vector\. In some Windows versions the “HKLM” may appear as “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE”
Once in Version Vector, look for the key called IE, right click it, and rename it to zIE.
(If you are running a 64-bit version of Windows, I would like to get in touch with you, to figure out the correct procedure for changing the key. A “registry reflector” copies values forth and back between the above mentioned key and HKLM\Software\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Version Vector\, which is used for 32-bit applications running on a 64-bit machine).
The next time Internet Explorer is started, the missing IE key will cause it to fetch needed information from other modules, where at least 4 slightly different character strings (containing version, subversion, build etc.) are available. The information found there will enable the standalones to function almost perfectly when presented with Conditional Comments. If you want to restore your OS to the previous registry state and browser behavior, simply rename the zIE key back to IE and restart Internet Explorer.