Heh, so MS do their usual first run of Internet Explorer redirects you to a "runonce" page to welcome you to their shiny new browser.

The problem is, a lot of people are doing their first run today - so the server hosting the "runonce.aspx" page has given up.

My (and, I'm sure, plenty of other people's) first experience of IE7 will be an app hanging while trying to load an unavailable page, followed by "Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage".

What makes all this worse is that the "firstrun" flag isn't set to false until that page finishes loading, so um... you see where this is going.

I've heard a lot of reports of people not being able to get IE7 working - I wonder how many of these are simply experiencing this problem?

Update: Here's how to fix the problem