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We have a very thorny issue going on with an application in a corporate environment. Any clue, no matter how remote, is getting some investigation.

We have a client application, written in Java Swing, running under Windows 7, that communicates with back end servers over the corporate network. No internet access is desired or allowed. Our development team would like it if Internet Explorer were not even installed on the machines, but corporate group policy overrides our wishes. As a compromise, we provide no way for the user to access IE. These are the most locked-down workstations imaginable. No IE, Word, Excel, etc. are accessible to the user. The only application accessible to the user to run is our application.

In investigating the problems we are having, we noticed in Task Manager that two instances of IExplore.exe are launched as soon as the user passes the login screen of our application. This is only the case in our production environment. In our lab environment, the same code runs and does not cause instances of IExplore.exe to run.

Our code certainly doesn't ask for IExplore to run. I thought there was some chance that something in Java Swing might do something under the covers that might launch IE, but that seems to be ruled out by our lab experience.

Can someone help me make sense of this scenario?

Steve Cohen
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1 Answers1

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Many things can cause programs to automatically to launch as I'm sure you know. Some of the top contenders:

  • Registry keys
  • "Startup" folder
  • Java trying to open a webpage
  • System processes
  • The list goes on...

My first suggestion would be to look into your registry keys (if possible, this may be locked) and see if anything calls Internet Explorer. Alternatively, you could boot into Ubuntu and manually delete Internet Explorer from the machines, but this is highly depreciated. Then, check if anything in your program could potentially use Internet Explorer (e.g. fetching data from a web page, APIs, etc.), Java has a tendency for causing strange issues such as this. If all else fails, you could convince someone to allow you to disable Internet Explorer.

Wish you the best of luck. ~Tsuser

Tsuser
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