On an XP SP3 PC which had IE8 rolled back to IE6 by others in an effort to deal with the consequences of a virus I found that there were no apparent entries in the recent website drop down list (so I figured they had been cleared) and an error occurred for each new url entered to go to. The virus was found and removed and the error message disappeared after reinstalling IE 8. However, the history drop down list now dos not save the urls of new websites that are gone to. The home page of the default site is there and nothing else will show in the drop down list. How do I reenable saving the urls of new sites that are visited in the history drop down list? The Favorites fortunately were not touched.
What I find even stranger is that Google Chrome is also installed on this PC but the user insists he never uses it Nevertheless although there is no drop down list in the Chrome browser, as one types a new url a list of suggested urls appear identical up to the point being typed. These suggested urls appear to be identical to the missing urls in IE8. Can't figure out what happened here but I was not the first person to work on this.