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Internet Explorer 8 text highlighted by Find command (Edit menu) loses highlighting after a short time

When I use the Find command in the Edit menu of Internet Explorer 8, the text that I am looking for on a web page gets highlighted as it should but after about 5 seconds all the highlighting disappears. If I wait long enough (maybe a minute or longer) and select the Next button the highlighting MAY reappear for a while again but will eventually disappear again.

This used to NOT happen. The found text would continue to be displayed highlighted and I could move from one occurance to the next for as long as I wanted to.

What would be causing this text to lose its highlighting?

This is happening on both a Windows XP and Windows 7 fully up to date machines.

Thanks.

Mark

LeeTutor

It could be an add-on that is messing things up. Have you tried it with Internet Explorer (No Add-ons), which you will find on your Start Menu under All Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools. If this works, then you can troubleshoot your normal IE connections by selecting Tools menu -> Manage Add-ons -> Enable or disable Add-ons.

Here is a Previously Answered Question of how to find the problem when IE No Add-ons stops it from happening:

https://www.experts-exchange.com/questions/24296000/Right-click-menu-is-freezed-in-IE-7.html?cid=236&anchorAnswerId=24076381#a24076381

XMarshall10

I agree with leetutor.
Due to some addons maybe your IE is getting refreshed (your pages are getting loaded automatically again) thereby erasing the highlight in your text.

-XM

mgump9

ASKER

Thanks for the suggestions. Unfortuately, disabling all the Add-ons did NOT cause the problem to go away. I agree tht this seems like a likely candidate to be causing this behavvior but unless there is something else about the Add-ons that I am not disabling, I suspect the culprit is something else.

I found that even running the "Internet Explorer (No Add-ons)" from the "All Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools" selecction did not show the Add-ons as disabled.. I had to explicitly go into the Manage Add-ons meu and Disable All. But, as I stated above, this did not even fix the problem. Would it be possible that the machine needs to be re-booted after disabling the Add-ons for that action to fully take effect? I did not re-boot but rather just restarted Internet Explorer.

Any other thoughts?

Thanks.

Mark

mgump9

ASKER

I just tried the Find function on another web page and it worked fine but when I went back to the specific web page that the highlighting was disappearing on, it acted like before where the highlighting went away after a few seconds. Here is the URL for the page that fails.

http://web.minorleaguebaseball.com/milb/stats/stats.jsp?sid=t427&t=g_log&gid=2010_09_06_kanafx_lwdafx_1

If you would like, try to see if it fails on your system the same way.. Maybe someone else will see something I am missing.. It looks like it could be specific to this web page. Just do a Find function for any word such as "the" then wait about 10 seconds. I am wondering if it has something to do with this particular page auto refreshing itself on a regulart basis and causing the highlighting to be undone.

Thanks.

Mark

LeeTutor

I think it is the web page itself. It happens to me also. And if I watch carefully, it seems that the page seems to be refreshing itself fairlly rapidly...

LeeTutor

I tried to do a View Source from the IE8 View menu to see if I could tell what was happening, but the window opens up for about a second and then disappears too fast for me to look at the source.

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LeeTutor

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mgump9

ASKER

LeeTutor,

Thanks for verifying that it does appear to be that particular web page's action that is causing this behavior. Do you, or anyone else, have any suggestions for how to overcome that page's operations so the highlighting doesn't disappear?

This is not a huge issue but it would be nice to have it behave the way it should. I was curious that I could never find any web report of others having this behavior for the Find function. Now I know that the reason for that is that it apparently is very web page specific. Still, it seems like it is something that IE should handle better.

Thanks for your input.

Mark

LeeTutor

I'm afraid I don't know of any way of countering whatever technique the web page is using. I was hoping to get an idea by trying to view the source, but even that seems not possible...

mgump9

ASKER

LeeTutor,

I was able to see see the Source for this web page and it was blank but only for the first 300 lines and then there was a lot of HTML code after that. I pasted that source (less the first 300 blank lines that actually did contain a few tab characters on a few of the lines) into a Word documentand that is attached to this post. I am not at all well versed in HTML but at the very top of the non-blank lines I noticed the following commands that look suspiciously like they might be causing the page to be getting refreshed on the basis of some time interval. Can you tell if that is what is happening?

<script type="text/javascript">
document.write("<scr")
document.write("ipt src=\"/scripts/currentTimeMillis.jsp?x="+new Date().getTime()+"\" type=\"text/javascript\"></scr")
document.write("ipt>")
</script>

Thanks.

Mark
BlueClaws-Baseball-web-page-sour.docx

LeeTutor

Good job on noticing that there was coding after a bunch of blank lines. I see that the code is in javascript. I have never learned or used javascript, so I can't answer your question directly. But I have the same suspicion you have...

mgump9

ASKER

LeeTutor,

Thanks for your input. I added a Javascript tag to this question so I'll see if anybody who knows Javascript can shed some light on it.

Thanks for trying. I'll give you the points if nobody else comes up with something.

Mark

mgump9

ASKER

I guess nobody else is going to add anything so I am going to give LeeTutor the points for identifying the problem.