Thursday, March 03, 2011

Silverlight Woes

Anyone else had trouble with the wizzy new Microsoft web add-on ? A largeish number of people are using it to present media content, and you need to download a client/environment/whatever.

Sky subscribers can watch Sky Sports online when away from home, and my son installed Silverlight on a Win2K box running Firefox 3.6 last time he came back in order to view the footy. Wrecked it. Every other website accessed via Firefox caused Firefox to close, and Silverlight uninstall failed, as did my attempted manual delete/registry hacks. Susan got very ratty 'cos it was 'her' box, ended up having to reinstall the whole C drive.

Is it just my ancient Windows release, or is Silverlight the spawn of the devil ?

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

could you not have started firefox in 'safe' mode.

which is supposed to run it without plugins and 3rd party stuff.

Laban said...

Could do, but it's a bit of a hassle every time you just want to surf the web.

Anonymous said...

yes but it allows you to get firefox running so you can remove the faulty pluggin..

At least that is the idea, not saying it would have worked in this case.

Anonymous said...

oh, I didn't mean Windows "Safe mode", I meant just in firefox.

You can launch Firefox in what it calls safemode where it loads up without any plugins or addons.
The purpose of which I believe is for the very problem you had, where a plugin is preventing you from starting the program, and also for safer surfing, as some plugins were blamed for security holes.

JuliaM said...

Is it up to date?

I got a message to install a patch for it a day or so ago (I don't actually use it, but it is installed) and I noticed it was quite a large patch.

Peter Risdon said...

It's the spawn of the devil. Get rid of it.

Windoze said...

Microshaft is the spawn of the devil. Their shiny new thingy is merely an assistant spawn.

Ian F4 said...

Doesn't Win2K have restore points ?