IE 7 and IBM Password Manager Software Conflicts with JInitiator

August 23rd, 2007 |   Send this article to a friend!

I recently bought a Lenovo IBM ThinkPad T61 notebook pre-installed with Windows XP SP2, Internet Explorer 7, Office 2007, and all the other IBM software bells and whistles. So far I’ve been quite happy with my purchase, however, I was disappointed to find several issues with IE and IBM factory software that caused my Internet Explorer session to crash when attempting to launch Oracle JInitiator. Upon clicking an apps link I get the infamous “Internet Explorer has encountered a problem and needs to close” error.

What good is a new laptop if I can’t use the tools to do my job!

Fortunately, after hours of tweaking, I was able to narrow down the root cause to two main issues:

Internet Explorer 7 Quick Tabs Conflict

The new Quick Tabs introduced in IE 7 do not play well with many Java-based applications – one of them being JInitiator. After my IE sessions continued to crash, I began randomly playing with the IE view settings and found that disabling the Quick Tabs bar solved the problem. To disable Quick Tabs, open an Internet Explorer 7 session and navigate to View > Quick Tabs.

After disabling Quick Tabs, close your browser session and start a new one. Assuming this is your only software conflict, this should do the trick. Unless…

ThinkPad Security Solution Conflict

Lenovo offers the ThinkVantage Productivity Center with all their notebooks. One of the neat features of the Productivity Center is the Client Security Solution. Not only does this solution allow

you to store passwords to all your applications and websites safely and securely, but it auto-logs into the apps for you too. Couple this with the new finger print reader and you have an amazingly effective, yet secure, password manager.

Unfortunately, an IE 7 add-on that the Client Security Solution uses to capture and store Internet based login information conflicts with JInitiator. The only apparent fix for this is to disable the Password Manager feature of the Client Security Solution entirely.

To do this, click the big blue ThinkVantage button on your notebook – the Productivity Center menu will appear.

Next, hover over ThinkVantage Technologies, then select Client Security Solution – the solution menu window will appear. Click the Password Manager and you should see a screen like this:

Clicking the “Disable” button will shutdown the manager.

Next, we need to disable the IE 7 add-ons that were installed by the Client Security Solution. To do this, open an IE 7 session and navigate to Tools > Manage Add-ons > Enable or Disable Add-ons. The Manage Add-ons window will appear.

In the manager you will notice two Lenovo-based add-ons:

• CPwmIEBrowserHelper Object
• ThinkVantage Password Manager

Select each of these add-ons and click the “Disable” radio button below so that both add-ons show up under the “Disabled” list as such:

Once you’ve finished, click OK, close all of your applications, and restart your notebook. After you log back into Windows, open an Internet Explorer session and try logging back into Oracle Apps. Again, assuming there are no other software conflicts with JInitiator, this should do the trick.

It’s unfortunate that all the features of IE 7 and ThinkVantage can’t be fully utilized, but like all initial software release, these kind of bugs usually happen and eventually get resolved through patches, upgrades, etc. Maybe Windows, Oracle and IBM can collectively provide a fix so that all three applications can play nicely together.

Did I just write that?

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Mr. Thompson is a Senior Oracle Applications Consultant with Lexerd Group Consulting. Visit www.LexerdGroup.com to find out more about our firm.

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Entry Filed under: General, Technical