Remove Internet Explorer Components

Article
10/07/2008

Internet Explorer dedicates a percentage of your available disk space for temporary Internet files. This cache is typically around 10 percent of your total available disk space and is not reflected in footprint size estimates. This can lead to a full disk situation on an embedded system that is in use. The new re-factoring changes in Feature Pack 2007 give you options to address this problem.

Many features in Windows XP Embedded used to depend on Internet Explorer. These features include:

.NET Framework 1.1
Help and Support Services
HTML Rendering Engine
IMAPI - CD Burning
Internet Connection Wizard
Microsoft Vector Graphics Rendering (VML)
Outlook Express
Shell Namespace Extensions
Soap Client Runtime
Windows .Net Messenger
Windows Media Player 10.0
Windows Movie Maker

These features have either a static or delay load dependency on one or more files owned by the Internet Explorer 6 component, leading to situations where a lot of unnessesary Internet Explorer 6 data was loaded just to access a single component, inflating the footprint size. These dependent files have been made independent of the Internet Explorer component and are now ‘Primitive’ components. A list of such independent files is shown below:

HLINK.DLL

INSENG.DLL

MSRATING.DLL

DXTRANS.DLL

IMGUTIL.DLL

ACTXPRXY.DLL

IEXPLORE.EXE

Iedkcs32.dll

JSPROXY.DLL

INETCPL.CPL

Cryptdlg.dll

IEINFO5.OCX

MSIDNTLD.DLL

MSIDENT.DLL

MSHTA.EXE

Each of the features listed above now depends on just one or more of these Primitives. This significantly reduces the resulting image footprint, because the whole of Internet Explorer 6 is no longer being loaded simply to supply a small module of functionality.

You can still have a fully functional Internet Explorer feature, but you now must explicitly add that feature to your runtime, otherwise you will only pick up one or a couple of IE’s individual file resources.

Remove Internet Explorer Components

See Also

Additional resources