My IE9 installation has become slow-to-unresponsive, and I would like to remove it and reinstall it.
Many months ago, I went to "Control Program", "Programs and Features", and selected "Turn Windows features on or off". Imagine my surprise when the Windows Features window came up empty! The PC seems to work just fine, except that IE9 takes forever to start up and, likewise, forever to do anything. The Vista 32-bit Home Premium SP2 installation is totally up-to-date - my Windows Update is always on full auto and checking daily. I kept ignoring IE9 (I use Firefox most of the time), but there are a few things that want to initiate an IE session, so it rears its ugly head once in a while.
I was hoping to simply reinstall the latest download of IE9 over top of what's there, but when I try, I get a message telling me that: "Setup can't continue because a more recent version of Internet Explorer is installed on your computer."
Does anyone know of way to get around this? I have no qualms about playing in the Registry. I have attached a screenshot of the registry's entry for Internet Explorer that shows the Current Build and Versioning info:
I really don't want to rebuild my system at this point.

Hmm....are you able to uninstall KB2586448 via Windows Update? I think we should stay away from the registry for now.
http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/92402 ... stall.html
Any help?

KB2586448 is not in the list of updates. (I tried looking for it before too.)
Is there some way of fooling Setup into doing its thing? Can you tell me what field(s) Setup is looking at? Can I do something simple like hack the registry to change the version number to 1?

Hacking a value in the registry will unlikely help so lets forget about that for a while.

Its odd that it isn't in the list of updates. Is it masked under a different KB?
Have you tried uninstalling with Revo?
May it be that you're infected with Malware?
Have you tried setting your 'Default Programs' so IE doesn't rear its ugly head?

My default browser is Firefox, but there are some things that still call IE instead of a default browser.
Windows Defender has found nothing in the way of malware. Everything runs as expected, except IE.
Revo is new to me. I'll check it out shortly.

I downloaded & installed Revo Pro - it doesn't see IE either, and it invokes the same Windows components routine as Control Panel, so, naturally, the Windows Features list is empty.

Do you still think I can do this without a registry hack, or (God forbid) rebuilding the system? I'm open to any and all suggestions.

Try and run System File Checker. This will hopefully rectify the empty Windows Features list. We can then try uninstalling from there.

Open an elevated command prompt, type and hit enter. This may take a while.

Note that Windows Defender is AntiSpyware. A much more comprehensive AntiMalware product called Microsoft Security Essentials is available.

I have both Defender and MSE running on my system.

I now have at least a partial Windows Features list, thanks to a link I found in a Microsoft Answers forum:

This article: http://www.raymond.cc/blog/archives/2009/03/06/fix-blank-or-empty-list-in-vista-turn-windows-features-on-or-off-optionalfeaturesexe/ has a way to fix a blank Windows Features box using CheckSUR ( http://support.microsoft.com/kb/947821 ) .

I'll try the sfc command too, just because I can.

You shouldn't.
Let us know how running the System File Check works out.

The Windows Features is exactly the same as before. What I have noticed since the CheckSUR run, though, is that IE9 isn't quite as interminably slow as it was before. I also got another reply in the other forum that may bring me closer yet ... If anything pans out, I'll post it here as well.
If all else fails, I'll have to bite the bullet and reinstall everything. (There's SO much to reinstall!) I'll probably turn my Vista machine into a Small Business Server, and use my ancient laptops to talk to it. (I upgraded an old Compaq Evo N1000c from XP to Win7 and the video demands of Win7 have made it tricky to run my videos - I've switched from Windows Media Player to RealPlayer, which keeps audio & video perfectly in synch. WMP has a setting to drop frames to keep the audio in synch, but it's still like watching foreign movies.)