Yeah this is something I should've mentioned. Favorites, feeds and the search box do not work unless you install it using the official installer. I could search for the keys responsible for these features and add them in the registry but that would take too much time and the only reason people "should" run IE7 in standalone mode is for testing only.

I also thought of doing everything in the background, if two more people complain I'll change the program so it does everything behind curtains. I thought it looks "cool" with the console window :D

About the 10 second rule, IE7 won't load without certain keys in the Windows Registry. There is no way of knowing when IE7 finishes loading the registry keys. I noticed that after 2 seconds of starting IE7 (starting iexplore.exe), it opens the keys and reads them and then it never opens them again. I know that because I'm using a proprietary program that monitors activity in the windows registry. It's set to 10 seconds to make sure IE7 finished loading the keys even when it runs on busy/slow PCs.