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Don't quote me on this, but I thought it was because IE9 made heavy use of Direct2D from DirectX10 or 11 or some such which XP doesn't have access to.

Firefox 4 uses the same Direct2D stuff but has a software fallback. It could be argued that IE9 should also have a software fallback, but they don't.

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IE9 does indeed have software fallback. You can toggle the setting from inetcpl.cpl -> advanced to disable hardware acceleration if you wish.

There must be some kind of fallback because IE9 runs fine inside a virtual machine with disabled graphics acceleration.

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