Many Visual InterDev 6 developers have destroyed their Visual InterDev 6 environments by installing Internet Explorer 5 beta. Microsoft mentions potential problems in the IE5 beta’s release notes but too many people have missed them. In short, don’t install Internet Explorer 5 beta on a machine with Visual InterDev 6 (VID 6).

Symptoms of a conflict include the disappearance of the VID 6 Grid control, crashes, and trouble with the Design and Source views. If you are lucky, you won’t have to reformat your disk drive to get VID 6 working again. There are no guarantees, but try the following steps first. To begin with, uninstall the IE 5 beta and then uninstall Visual InterDev 6. Next, reinstall IE 4.01 service pack 1 and then install the latest Java Virtual Machine (VM) from http://www.microsoft.com/java. Reinstall Visual InterDev 6 and cross your fingers.

There have been rumors of a forthcoming fix for this problem from Microsoft, so keep checking the IE 5 site for more information.