Interesting: I have almost the same story here this evening. IE8 came
up as an update with dotNET 3.5 so I figured what the hell, give it a
try. Did an incremental backup, stored a system state, and let 'er rip.
"Rip" is right. It took forever to install (over an hour) and the whole
machine dropped to its knees w/r to speed.
Several Restarts & a Cold Boot later I'd have enough and dropped back
to the drive image just prior to those updates. Everything's back to
nifty now and I've told update to never offer those to me again. The
dotNET never did get installed.
I've heard rumors that if you download ie separately it's OK but for
now I think I'll live with 7 and let 8 ripen for a long while more. The
whole thing was a PITA, like most of microsoft's efforts lately. Soon's
I get all the drivers I need, MS is gone, gone, gone! XP is the only
tie I have left and I can't wait to disconnect from it. Everything else
has been replaced except VB which I no longer use. I'm running low on
Vaseline!

Twayne`



Arfur wrote:
> I'm seeing exactly the same problem as Bargz describes, namely a
> slowdown of the desktop background with white lag. It started when I
> upgraded to IE8 but my story gets a bit sadder...
>
> At first I didn't realise it was IE8 but I did notice that the white
> lag cleared up if I were to stop the explorer.exe process. When I
> restarted explorer.exe then the white lag returned. I decided that
> there might be a registry corruption causing explorer to slow things
> down so I did a system restore to the previous week and then
> everything then seemed ok.
>
> The following day I noticed that IE8 was no longer working and then I
> realised that the restore had restored me to before I installed IE8.
> So I reinstalled IE8 and to my dismay the white lag returned.
> So next I decided to can IE8 and roll back to IE7. I uninstalled IE8
> and installed IE7 but to my further dismay IE7 refuses to run - it
> just drops back to the desktop.
> So now my choices are to have IE8 with a slowdown or to move over to
> Firefox (which I'm currently using but it keeps locking me up so i
> want it uninstalled asap).
>
> Help!
>
> another clue - with IE8 installed then I can't change the background
> without a restart. The old background remains on the desktop even
> after I've changed it in the display properties window.
>
> My specs are:
> Fijitsu siemens Pentium 4 HT 3.6 GHz
> 2 GB memory
> NVidia GeForce 7950 driver version 182.08
> Windows XP SP3 with all high-priority updates
>
> Intersting that Bargz also has Pentium HT chip?
>
> any advice appreciated...
>
> ---------
>
> "bargz" wrote:
>
>> I have Windows XP SP3, and I decided to install Internet Explorer 8
>> last week. It installed fine, and I used it for a week, but my
>> desktop UI speed had become NOTICEABLY sluggish: when I move windows
>> around, there would be a white "lag" behind them, similar to turning
>> on "mouse trails" for your cursor. It acted like I had disabled
>> video acceleration. Also, YouTube videos were jittery and my CPU
>> utilization was very high while watching.
>>
>> Thinking it may have been outdated NVidia drivers, I downloaded and
>> installed the latest release from NVidia's web site, but the
>> situation did not improve.
>>
>> I've searched the web and the newsgroups and cannot find anyone with
>> a similar problem; I found some people complained about sluggish WEB
>> PAGES with IE8, but my issue is not that web pages are slow to load,
>> but specifically it's a problem with my GUI rendering speed.
>>
>> Anyway, this morning I uninstalled IE8, rebooted, and now my GUI
>> speed is back to normal (fast) -- I can move windows around without
>> trails -- so it is obviously something with Internet Explorer 8.
>>
>> My system specs:
>> Dell 400SC
>> Pentium-4 HT 2.8GHz single core
>> 3 GB memory
>> NVidia GeForce 7600 GS 512MB AGP 8X, driver version 185.85
>> Dual LCD monitors
>> Windows XP SP3 with all high-priority updates
>>
>> Thoughts? Anyone?