Wikimedia Bugzilla is closed!

After enabling WikiEditor on our MediaWiki 1.17.1 system, a small number of users are experiencing browser crashes in IE8. (The whole browser hangs as WikiEditor is rendering.)

The solution has been to visit My Preferences and simply click the Save button. After that, no more crashes.

Any ideas what could be causing this?

As an experiment, I set my own preferences to be equal to those of a "crashing" user.  My browser did not crash. 

Here are the preferences for the crashing user, before the "re-save":

select * from vpw_user_properties where up_user = 56;
+---------+----------------------------------+-------------+
| up_user | up_property                      | up_value    |
+---------+----------------------------------+-------------+
|      56 | categorysortdisable              | 0           | 
|      56 | cyanrss                          | 0           | 
|      56 | editwidth                        | 0           | 
|      56 | enotifminoredits                 | 0           | 
|      56 | nickname                         | Mike Smith  | 
|      56 | officetoolbarbuttons-enable-word | 1           | 
|      56 | rememberpassword                 | 1           | 
|      56 | searchNs10                       | 0           | 
|      56 | searchNs100                      | 0           | 
|      56 | searchNs204                      | 0           | 
|      56 | searchNs205                      | 0           | 
|      56 | searchNs206                      | 1           | 
|      56 | searchNs207                      | 1           | 
|      56 | shownumberswatching              | 0           | 
|      56 | skin                             | monobook    | 
|      56 | sqltagdisable                    | 0           | 
|      56 | timecorrection                   | System|-240 | 
|      56 | usebetatoolbar                   | 1           | 
|      56 | usebetatoolbar-cgd               | 1           | 
|      56 | variant                          |             | 
|      56 | vp-wikieditor-switched           | 1           | 
|      56 | wikieditor-preview               | 1           | 
+---------+----------------------------------+-------------+
22 rows in set (0.00 sec)

Here they are after re-saving preferences:

select * from vpw_user_properties where up_user= 56;
+---------+--------------------+-------------+
| up_user | up_property        | up_value    |
+---------+--------------------+-------------+
|      56 | enotifminoredits   |             | 
|      56 | nickname           | Mike Smith  | 
|      56 | recencylimit       |             | 
|      56 | rememberpassword   | 1           | 
|      56 | searchNs10         |             | 
|      56 | searchNs100        |             | 
|      56 | searchNs204        |             | 
|      56 | searchNs205        |             | 
|      56 | searchNs206        | 1           | 
|      56 | searchNs207        | 1           | 
|      56 | timecorrection     | System|-240 | 
|      56 | usebetatoolbar     | 1           | 
|      56 | usebetatoolbar-cgd | 1           | 
|      56 | vp-sqlpref         | static      | 
|      56 | watchlisttoken     |             | 
|      56 | wikieditor-preview | 1           | 
+---------+--------------------+-------------+
16 rows in set (0.00 sec)

You'll see a few custom preferences, but I don't see why WikiEditor would pay any attention to them.