June 23, 2010

We are sorry for inconvinience.

Internet Explorer crashed on my work computer today, displaying the following error message:


(The actual text, for Google purposes: "Internet Explorer raised unhandled exception in third party module and should be closed. We are sorry for inconvinience.")

The lack of articles and the misspelling made me think it's some browser hijack cleverly disguised as an error dialog. However, any anti-virus or anti-malware program I can find to run doesn't throw up any flags. Googling for the specific text doesn't give any hard info, but does show up instances of this message dating back to 2004!

This was in IE 8 on XP today, so either this is in some little-touched section of the IE code that hasn't been updated in forever (less likely), or it's thrown by some library that's used by toolbars or plugins (slightly more likely), or it's actually from XP, and never got updated in any of the 3 1/2 service packs and 45,000 other miscellaneous updates rolled out for that beast (most likely). Either way, text like this isn't supposed to make it out in a release, much less persist through many versions over many years.