I had the same issue where IE7 hung and refused to close unless killed via Task Manager. Annoyingly when this happened IE7 wouldn't load ANY sites as it appeared to be waiting for the settings to be done.

I managed to get around this by downloading the google.reg file linked above and installing the keys in the registry... The next time I opened IE7 it paused on the runonce but instead of freezing allowed me to use the browser.

HTH
Elton

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