A lot of people are having some issues with Internet Explorer 8. Internet Explorer for some unknown reason would give you a Search Default Provider Error every time you open it.

A Program on your computer has corrupted your default search setting for Internet Explorer.

Internet Explorer has reset this setting to your original search provider.

Internet Explorer will now open Search Settings, where you can change this setting or install more search providers.

You would get this message every time you open Internet Explorer 8. The funny things is even though you have Live as your default search provider, it would still give you this error.

I started receiving the error when I downloaded Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2. Searched for solutions but none of them work. Decided to wait for the official release hoping that the peeps at Microsoft would resolve the issue. Microsoft peeps are very much aware of the issue but for some Microsoft reasons were not able to recreate the problem. This is taken from Microsoft Connect.

Thank you for this feedback.

In our investigations to date we have not been able to reproduce this problem as described. However, with the release of IE8 December Partner Build this bug is outdated; it may have been fixed by the many changes we’ve made since Beta 2. If your issue still reproduces on the latest IE build, please update the repro steps and re-activate your bug.

Thank you,
The IE Team
Posted by Microsoft on 3/13/2009 at 2:24 PM
We meant to refer you to the Release Candidate build in January (not the Partner build). Sorry for the confusion.

The IE Team.
Posted by Microsoft on 3/13/2009 at 2:39 PM

As per their response, the official release would resolve the issue. But this is Microsoft and the official release did not solve the issue.

There are a lot of solutions if you have time to Google. Some of them worked for some and some did not. I tried three different solutions and found a work around.

All solutions require registry tweaking. If you are not familiar with the registries, I would suggest you back them up first before doing anything.

This is from Kirb’s Musings:

  1. Make sure IE 8 is closed then navigate to registry key: HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorerUser Shell Folders
  2. Add a new “Expandable String value” inside the above mentioned key with a value name of “AppData” and a value data of “%USERPROFILE%Application Data”.
  3. Reopen IE 8 and see if you still get the error message.

This solution worked for my friend: Deleted the registry key HKCU/Software/Microsoft/Internet Explorer/User Preferences

Another solution from Egg Head Cafe:

under HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftInternet ExplorerSearchUrl
i found a key named (default) and the data was
http://www.google.com/keyword/s% (or keyword/%s i forgot)
and i went to google and serched keword and pasted the url to replace the
data and now it works perfectly :)

if you want to fix it without going into regedit.exe with a fear you might
suff something up download this registry key and just click on it:
http://rapidshare.com/files/199887661/click_to_fix.reg.html
you may need to set google as default search

if want to use a different search engine than google or don’t mind browsing
through regedit simple go to your search engine and search for *keyword*
(without the *’s) copy the link and paste it into the key (default) located
in HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftInternet ExplorerSearchUrl
and all should be fixed

The work around from Kirb’s Musings worked for me and a couple of friends. You can try it out but make sure to back up your registries first. Hope that Microsoft would fix the issue once IE Updates are available.

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