Internet Explorer stops responding and other system performance issues

When you start Microsoft Internet Explorer, the program may appear to stop responding (hang). Or, you may experience other system performance issues.

This behavior can occur if the speech recognition feature (Sapisvr.exe) is enabled and running and there is insufficient RAM installed in your computer. Speech recognition requires at least 128 megabytes (MB) of RAM to run effectively. This requirement can cause performance issues, particularly on computers with only 64 MB of RAM.

If you use speech recognition often but you are running into problems related to low memory, consider upgrading your computer to at least 128 MB of RAM; note that 196 MB or 256 MB will offer significantly better performance still. Also, turn off speech recognition when you are not using it. To do this, click the Microphone button on the Language bar so that neither Dictation nor Voice Command is displayed.

For more information about how to disable the speech recognition feature through the Language bar, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

The Address bar of Internet Explorer is speech-enabled. If your mouse pointer is positioned in the Address bar while your microphone is on, the speech recognition engine will "listen" to all the noise in your environment and attempt to recognize it as dictated speech. Depending on the amount of noise in your environment, this functionality can significantly degrade the performance of your system.

Steps to reproduce the problem

On a Windows XP, Microsoft Windows 2000, or Microsoft Windows NT 4.0-based computer, press CTRL+ALT+DELETE, and then select Task Manager on the Processes tab to determine whether Sapisvr.exe is running. If it is, the speech recognition feature may be the cause of the issues described in the "Symptoms" section of this article.

Steps to remove speech recognition through Control Panel

If you rarely use speech recognition, follow these steps to remove the feature:

1. In Control Panel, open Regional and Language Options.
2. On the Languages tab, click Details under Text Services and Input Languages.
3. Under Installed services, click Speech Recognition, and then click Remove.
4. Click OK to apply all changes. You may need to restart your computer.

For help with system performance issues in Windows Vista, visit the following Microsoft web page:

For more information about speech recognition, click the following article numbers to view the articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: