America Online on Thursday confirmed that a bug in its new Netscape 8 Web browser was breaking certain XML configurations in Microsoft's IE.

The issue first surfaced on Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer Weblog, where chief IE developer Dave Massy recommended that users completely uninstall Netscape as a possible workaround.

According to Microsoft's Massy, Netscape 8 corrupts the XML rendering capabilities of Internet Explorer, meaning that an IE user navigating to an XML file, such as an RSS feed, is greeted with a blank page.

On message boards and newsgroups, users flocked to complain. "This is a pretty major bug and should be fixed ASAP," read one post on the Netscape Browser Review forum.

A Netscape administrator on the forum apologized to users and stressed that the registry key was not intentionally changed. "The development team is hard at work on a patch." The latest hiccup follows the embarrassing release of Netscape 8 with several publicly known security vulnerabilities.

FIX for the problem which there is no excuse, and Netscape looks really bad this time. Of course you can always blame MS.

1. Uninstall Netscape 8
2. START->RUN
   1. Type: regedit
   2. Hit ENTER
   3. Navigate to the following:
   4. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Plugins\Extension
   5. Highlight and right-click the node titled "xml" and select delete.
   6. Restart Internet Explorer

Unfortunately if Netscape 8 remains installed then the registry key is continually rewritten so this is an essential step if you are to be able to view XML content in IE.