It appears that an update from Microsoft on 4/15/2006 caused a minor bug in Internet Explorer, but it also caused a major problem in Visual Studio 2003. The bug only exists if the computer has “HP Share to Web” software installed on it or Sunbelt’s “Kerio Personal Firewall” installed on it. The IE bug is simply that urls won’t resolve if they do not have an http:// in front of them. Microsoft has a recently published KB article about this bug and how to fix it:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/918165?
However, in addition to the bug in IE, Visual Studio 2003 hangs when you try to open a project. I assume that VS.NET is trying to make a web request to some server using either an IP address or domain name without preceding it with http://. I suspected that the two bugs were related, and sure enough, when I applied the fix described in the article above, both the IE bug and the Visual Studio bug were resolved.
I suspect that any software that makes web requests without http:// or even ftp://, gopher://, etc., might experience similar problems as with Visual Studio 2003. However, Visual Studio 2005 did not suffer from this problem.
Thanks to Ask-Leo.com for pointing me to Microsoft’s KB article:
http://ask-leo.com/why_does_ie_now_require_http_in_the_address_bar.html