It turns out that updating from a very old web browser to a somewhat less old (yet still outdated) web browser is not necessarily as simple as it might be. For more on this, read on* – but the short version of importance to know is:
Almost all public machines recently received an update from Internet Explorer version 8 to version 9. Shortcuts, favorites, plugins and the like have been unaffected in all of our testing beforehand. If you encounter problems or have questions, please pass them on.
*Last year INB was approved to run on Internet Explorer 9, and the group policy that blocks IE9 was removed. As we noticed that computers still were not receiving IE 9 as an update, we found we had a registry entry to modify to undo the group policy block that had been applied. As of that time, anyone running Microsoft Update should receive the IE9 update.
Our computer labs do not run the regular Microsoft Updates, though, since most users do not have administrative privileges on those computers. Dell KACE applies critical Microsoft Updates on a regular basis – but IE9 is no longer in that update list (as it has been replaced by IE10 & IE11). So, a manual installation has also been set up for this purpose.