by Jason Perlow
August 4th, 2008 @ 2:52 pm

The Mother-in-law versus Vista battle cold war never ends. Every week, it’s something different that goes wrong that brings us to the brink of annihilation, and I have to swoop in on the weekends to fix the inevitable new problem that comes up.

Fortunately, I have the system more or less stabilized, and I finally figured what was going wrong with her Multiple Listing System printing out all sorts of HTML garbage issue. You care about how I figured it out, right? No? Well, too bad. You see, being as protective and sensitive to virus and spyware issues that I am, I installed Mozilla Firefox on mom’s laptop, in addition to a virus scanner and spyware sweeping software and some other general crapware cleaning utilities.

This has always been my standard operating procedure on my own XP systems, which I maintain primarily now as VM’s running on my servers. Naturally, I carried forward the same methodology to mom’s Windows Vista laptop. When I installed Firefox, I answered the following question when prompted - “Use Firefox as the default system browser?” - naturally, I answered yes. Unbeknownst to me, with this single click of a mouse, I screwed up mom’s line of business application.

You see, as it pertains to Vista, when you do this, a number of default file associations get set in the registry to use Firefox instead of Internet Explorer 7. While this may not affect a lot of web sites, it did happen to affect Garden State MLS, the main web site she uses. I had to do a lot of Googling to find out just exactly why this was happening, but eventually, the solution to this problem was “Uninstall Firefox”.