Problem:

I’ve discovered an issue with the Skype for Business add-ons to Internet Explorer which causes pages with large amounts of text to freeze briefly when scrolling.

As part of a Skype for Business install, two add-ins get loaded. They use the same Class ID and DLL File, and provide options such as click to call links on phone numbers on a page:

With these addons loaded though, some sites lag and freeze that have large amounts of text; here’s a good example. Scrolling through the page for several seconds either through mousewheel or sidebar should result in a brief freeze lasting a second or two. Other browsers are fine (such as Chrome or Edge), and Internet Explorer is fine without the above add-ons.

I had a few people confirm this experience, including @CliffordKennedy (Thank you!)

Solution:

This seems to be a problem that was around a while ago, and possibly only occurs in less common circumstances. If you can live without the IE addin, the solution is to disable it. However for me, I couldn’t do this as the option was greyed out – plus that solution doesn’t work at scale.

Other solutions like disabling via the registry didn’t seem to work for this add-in either, it came back. Even removing the OCHelper.DLL file didn’t stop it loading! Uninstalling Skype for Business altogether worked, but that’s a bit too drastic.

There is a Group Policy however, called ‘Add-on List’ located under Computer Configuration\Policies\Administrative Templates\Windows Components\Internet Explorer\Security Features\Add-on Management. Here, you can add the Class ID and set the value to 0 for disabled, 1 for enabled, and 2 for enabled but users can disable/enable. More instructions from Microsoft here.

For this one I’ve chosen to disable, but the ‘enable and let users disable’ option is quite nice – it’d be even better if there was a ‘disable but let users enable’!

This worked for me, and the add-in is now disabled, and the scrolling issue is gone. In the meantime, I have a case open with Microsoft and can hopefully have the root cause resolved too.

 

Update 21st September 2019

Microsoft Support have told me there is no fix planned for this issue. With that in mind, if you need to use IE I’d recommend disabling the addins: