Jon Galloway has an excellent tip on running IE 7 Beta 1 side-by-side with IE6. IE has always been terrible about overwriting, which makes testing web sites with different versions of IE... difficult. Here are the steps:
- Download the IE7 Beta 1 Install from MSDN
- Open the install file with WinRAR (yep, it's an EXE, but it's a self extracting EXE) and extract them to a folder. Alternatively, you can just run the EXE, make a copy of the files which are extracted in the first step, and cancel the install. I was too chicken to do this on my work computer.
- Look in the folder you extracted to for the file SHLWAPI.DLL. Delete this file.
- Create a new text file in the folder, then rename it to IEXPLORE.exe.local.
That's it. The .local file in the folder tells the IExplore.exe instance to run in local mode, which means it won't mess with your IE6 settings, registry, etc.