I stubbornly used IE7 back when I had Vista, even after IE8 was officially out. Well, I upgraded to Windows 7 recently and now I'm stuck with IE8. But I'm still having a problem that I had back in IE7 on Vista.

When I click to open a new tab (I've got the New Tab page disabled, it just shows the about:blank page), usually what's supposed to happen is the address bar is given focus so the user can just start typing a link. This is what used to happen to me, for the first day or so using IE8 on Windows 7. But now what's happening is the new tab opens, the address bar gets focus for half a second (literally) and then loses it, so I have to manually give it focus. It seems a minor inconvenience...but it's really really annoying. I'm constantly opening new tabs to research some new aspect of whatever project I'm working on and I don't want to have to take the extra few seconds to make sure the address bar has focus. It's more than just giving the address bar focus, I'm so used to it just having it that I open a new tab and just start typing, so I'll open a tab and get through typing a url just to realize that the address bar doesn't have focus, so I have to give it to it, then retype the (potentially very long) url AGAIN!

The ONLY thing I can think that would interfere with the address bar is a toolbar that I have installed, which has a news ticker on it. When I open a new tab I guess the toolbar is reloaded or maybe just that component is reloaded (the news ticker is fed from an XML feed). Further research shows that no, the news ticker seems to have nothing to do with it. I disabled it in my toolbar installation and I still get no focus. I went all out and straight disabled the toolbar and BAM, I get focus again.

So here's my problem, I want to continue using my toolbar, I like my toolbar. I also want to be able to keep the ability to have my address bar be focused when I open a new tab. It's a Conduit toolbar...so...does anyone have any suggestions?

And just so you all know, sometimes it works properly, it's not always broken.