[gui-talk] IE 8: I installed, but have questions now

[Joel Deutsch]

Immediately after the install was done and my computer rebooted, I launched 
Internet Explorer and I'm perplexed by a bunch of dings and dongs and 
messages I guess I'm supposed to respond to.

Basically, these messages keep coming up saying that this or that is 
incompatible with IE 8 and do I want to allow it to run anyway, or have IE 
look for updates, or whatever. I suppose these things that come up are 
add-ones, but I don't recognize any of them by name. I mean, I've never 
intentionally enabled or even familiarized myself with whatever it's talking 
about.

and a  a message keeps coming up asking if I want to learn how to fix an 
incompatibility problem having to do with something called DRI, or drive 
access something or other, and I have no idea what it's talking about. It 
keeps taking me to a Microsoft Web page that's apparently full of 
information I'm supposed to understand in order to then do something or 
other. If I close this page in confusion, some other message comes up 
telling me something else is wrong. The messages that say I need to adjust 
my add-ons seem to be temporary, fleeting messages you'd have to see and 
click on with a mouse within seconds, but I think I heard I should open 
Tools and find the tab where I can do something with add-ons. I go there 
only to find it says all add-ons are disabled. I guess this is good, if it 
was the default setting?

Does anyone have any idea what it is I'm experiencing? I thought IE8 would 
just install itself seamlessly over IE7 and any new features would be stuff 
I'd learn by looking at Anna Dresner's instructions. But it's more than 
that. It's all these incompatibility announcements. I have no idea what's 
going on.

Advice? Help? I don't want to freak out and call my friend who's an IT 
professional to ruin his Saturday with his wife and come over to play with 
the browser and get it set up right. I'd be happy to fix up this stuff 
myself, but I have no idea what it's talking about.

Help!
P.S. At the end of the download and install procedure, the dialogue stayed 
on the screen for a long time (I'm partial and could see this happening) and 
seemed hung up about trying to search for and download IE updates, and 
finally after many minutes doing nothing it allowed me to finish and reboot, 
advising me to launch the browser immediately and check for updates in the 
Tools menu. But when I did, all I got was the good old MS updates page, not 
something specific to the browser, and by this time I was just too baffled 
to figure out if there was some update for IE waiting to be downloaded and 
installed. So I just got out of there. I don't know if this has anything at 
all to do with the trouble I describe above. I'm just sayhing, the download 
and install dialogue made this announcement that it could not install 
updates and I should take care of that myself, but I don't think there are 
any updates to be had, anyway.

Ack. Going nuts, here.