Saturday 8 December 2012

A blast from the past

This morning, I noticed that my lovely web hosts 1and1 had managed to break parts of my website that had been running the day before.

It turned out they’ve planned to discontinue all versions of php before 5.4, and some of my .htaccess files had these lines included

AddType x-mapp-php4 .htm

or

AddType x-mapp-php5 .htm

These lines caused the apache server to interpret .htm files with either php 4.x or php 5.2

Now it turns out that they’ve made it x-mapp-php6 to interpret the files as 5.4

However, that’s not the reason for this post.  The real reason, is I navigated to some of my webpages that had java on them to render the help table of contents, like

http://www.metstats.com/help/

When I navigated there with my browser, I got a DEP error, and crashed internet explorer.  How odd I thought.  It works in Chrome (telling me Java isn’t installed).  After the recent round of security issues I thought I’d be better off without Java, and uninstalled it.

So off to the event viewer:

Faulting application name: iexplore.exe, version: 9.0.8112.16455, time stamp: 0x507284ba
Faulting module name: msjava.dll, version: 5.0.2752.0, time stamp: 0x35747274
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x000c5a6c
Faulting process id: 0x299c
Faulting application start time: 0x01cdd53a1a8e7151
Faulting application path: C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe
Faulting module path: C:\Windows\system32\msjava.dll
Report Id: 588d3e4c-412d-11e2-b9b6-001167d3ed60

msjava.dll faulted?  That’s so 1999.  In fact it was discontinued in 1999

http://www.microsoft.com/About/Legal/EN/US/Interoperability/Java/Default.aspx

So, why is java still on my machine when I removed it.  Searching Programs and Features, I found Microsoft VM for Java

I suspect this was installed by a very old copy of Visual Studio I still have around for supporting old software, but as I never did Java, I decided that could go.

But on installation, I found this humorous warning:

Java

I have to admit, I don’t think I need to worry about that particular loss…

Now rebooted and uninstalled, and IE crashes no more.  Who knows how many more security issues were present though.