Uninstalling Vault breaks IE?

[mbainbridge]

Over christmas, we upgraded from Vault 3.5.2 to Fortress 1.0.6. Most people installed the Fortress client alongside the Vault client and then switched when the server was upgraded.

However, when the Vault client is subsequently uninstalled, we're finding that IE6 and IE7 are being broken. Sites which use javascript pop-ups are being blocked; windows appear blank with an hourglass cursor and occasionally invisible windows appear in the taskbar.

This happens on local servers such as our timesheet program, Replicon WebTimeSheet and external sites such as British Airways e-tickets, even though the pop-up blocker is turned off. (Fortress and Replicon are on the same server, in IE's Trusted zone)

After some digging, rolling back with System Restore, crashing DiffMerge while trying to diff 100MB registry exports (!) and blaming our IT people for making sneaky GPO changes, I've narrowed it down to uninstalling Vault. As soon as Vault or Fortress is reinstalled, IE starts working properly again.

I can replicate this behaviour on more than one machine. Now that the fix is known (uninstall Vault before installing Fortress) I thought I'd post it in case anyone else has seen this behaviour.

[ian_sg]

Manually registering one or more COM dlls (via regsvr32) fixes this problem, too.

Other references:

http://support.sourcegear.com/viewtopic.php?t=82
http://support.sourcegear.com/viewtopic.php?t=1329