Internet Explorer Crashes on Opening – EntAPI.dll

Busy, busy busy on the first week back!

Got a call today from someone who was having problems opening Internet Explorer

Each time he’d get an application fault

My first thought down to previous experience was that it was an add-on trying to load I so ran IE in “no add-ons” mode. IE opened fine so I spent a little while disabling lots off add-ins with little success so I went back to the beginning and looked in the event log for the actual error (should have just done this first!)

Faulting application iexplore.exe, version 7.0.6000.16762, faulting module entapi.dll, version 8.0.0.240, fault address 0x0000368a.

I found the entapi.dll file in the windows\system32 folder and the file properties suggested it was a McAfee component

A quick search turned up lots of people with similar problems who “resolved” the issue by simply renaming the file

I renamed the file and as reported this stopped Internet Explorer crashing

Not a complete fix in my book though as this means all I’d done was stop a component of the anti-virus software from loading!

Since it was a McAfee component I went to their knowledge base and did I search on entapi.dll hoping to find out a little more about what it does and the very first entry was this

Internet Explorer crashes in a Buffer Overflow module (KB57756)

entapi.dll is part of the buffer overflow module? Glad I wanted to dig a bit deeper 🙂

The article says that it’s a know issue with version 8.0.0.240 and updating to one of the following will fix it;

VirusScan Enterprise 8.0i cumulative Patch 14. or upgrade to VirusScan Enterprise 8.5i/8.7

This particular PC had 8.0i on so I loaded the latest patch (which was 16) and this fixed the problem

I checked the properties of the old and new entapi.dll files and we’d jumped from version 8.0.0.240 to 8.0.0.455

Sorted!

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Andy Parkes is Technical Director at Coventry based IT support company IBIT Solutions. Formerly, coordinator of AMITPRO and Microsoft Partner Area Lead for 2012-2013. He also isn't a fan of describing himself in the third person.

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