Even scanners don’t like Internet Explorer

Quite impressive actually, I’ve had Vista for some time now and only just ran into this problem. Well, maybe that’s being kind to Microsoft. I installed it at the end of February and sat about putting all of my needed programs on it, including Firefox. With FF installed, I never really needed to open Internet Explorer (IE) and ignored it. Occasionally a program would launch IE itself, upon which point I would be presented with an “Internet Explorer has stopped working” dialogue box and the assurance that “Windows can check online for a solution to the problem” - fine and dandy…except there was no solution.

This didn’t really bother me for the last 2 months, until today when I needed IE. Obviously since Windows couldn’t solve it, I’d have to do it myself. Taking a look at the detail of the error I found out that:

Fault Module Name: ophookSE2.dll

I’d never heard of it and expected to find Google telling me it belonged to Microsoft somewhere along the line. In fact, it was published by ScanSoft, Inc. This was a little bit more helpful, I had a scanner, a Canon, but would that really be causing the problems? A quick look down the Programs list told me that ScanSoft, Inc. were responsible for OmniPage SE - the OCR software that comes with my scanner. Since I don’t really use OCR that much, I was happy to uninstall it to check it was the culprit. Annoyingly, it wouldn’t budge as the uninstaller wasn’t designed for Vista (although the installer worked…typical!).

A little more Googling turned up this rather unhelpful page which provided the new software but told me I first had to uninstall the old version. I decided to try the new installer anyway, but it didn’t want to run at all. My temporary solution was then to rename the file OpHookSE2.dll (in Program Files -> ScanSoft -> OmniPageSE2.0) to something like OpHookSE2_.dll (shouldn’t really matter). I was surprised an happy to see that this was indeed a solution, and I now have a fully working Internet Explorer.

In the hope that someone else out there has similar problems, I’ve put this here.
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After testing some OCR, it appears that this hasn’t affected the normal working dramatically, so I’m going to let it be. If anyone manages to get it working by installing the new software, do tell.
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After leaving it a bit longer, Vista doesn’t like this missing dll too much and wants to try and install it every right click of an image. To get around this, I used ShellExView to remove it from the popup menu. You need to run this program as an administrator (right click on it in the start menu) or else it won’t work.
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Thanks to a comment left below by Angel, the Canon USA website seems to offer Vista downloads. This may be the best option, but I haven’t tried it personally.