Check this out…

My Vista stability score was well on its way back to 10 when I got hammered with some hard crashes in Internet Explorer. It took me a while to figure out what the problem was, but then I noticed the Sun Java icon in the toolbar and the Data Execution Protection message…

I had recently enabled DEP with Internet Explorer via the Internet Options menu (you’ll have to run Internet Explorer as an Administrator before you can change this option). I was sort of curious about it and wanted to check it out.

I discovered about DEP and Internet Explorer 7 via Michael Howard’s blog and I also verified from a comment to his post that (as of the writing of this post), the Sun JVM does not work with DEP in Internet Explorer.

So, if you’re getting a lot of random crashes in IE, don’t stress out. It might be DEP. Too bad my stability score had to drop so low, though.