For months I have been struggling with a very strange issue where my Internet Explorer caption bar gets filled with garbage (e.g. ??????????????????4???????) . I have not been able to find any help on the Internet so wanted to post my findings here.

The issue pops up randomly and seems to be unrelated to anything I've done recently on the machine. The symptoms are that the Caption / Title bar of Internet Explorer (IE) display garbage for every web page opened and IE crashes when I attempt to close the browser.

Today it happened again, so once again I tried to get the problem resolved. In the past I have always just gone to a System Restore point a day or so in the past and that fixed it. So, I thought it was relate to automatic updates in Windows. However, when I went to restore today I found that I did not have any system restore points, but that's a different issue related to a recent computer tragedy I had.

So, without having system restore to fall back on I had to find more clues as to what was going on. After some investigation and experimenting I discovered that removing the Google Toolbar corrected the problem. Just to confirm I reinstalled the Google Toolbar and the problem re-occurred. See the screen shots below for examples of what I'm talking about.

Before Google Toolbar:

After installing Google Toolbar:

Exception raised when trying to close IE after Google Toolbar installed:

So, since this has driven me nuts in the last 4-6 months I really wanted to get something out there that might help someone else.

Have a blessed day.