Remove Internet Explorer Components
5/10/2007
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.