If you’re having trouble with Internet Explorer 8 not opening links in Vista, try running IE once as an Administrator.

I have my wife setup to run as a Standard User on her Vista SP1 laptop.  After installing IE8, first from a downloaded installer file and then later from Windows Update, she found that there were certain links that simply wouldn’t work.  That is, she’d click a link and nothing would happen, as if it were ignoring her.  There were no messages or indicators of any kind.

It turned out that the links in question opened up another browser window or popup of some kind.  If you held down CTRL while clicking the links, it would open a new tab but still never loaded the page.  I tried to disable the popup blocking and fully trusting the sites in question but neither of those things fixed it, nor any other option I could find.  Eventually I tried logging into the Administrator account to run IE8 from there, and everything suddenly worked as expected.

Now my wife reports that she is able to click links as before from her Standard User account.  Presumably some kind of one-time initialization needed to occur under a full Administrator account.

I logged in as an Administrator, but it may also work if you simply use the Run As Administrator menu.  Give it a try if you find that links don’t work for no apparent reason.