Cannot view browser history in IE9

I've been experiencing this problem and solved it recently. The problem seems to be caused by the index.dat file growing beyond a 16MB limitation. Once it grows past that size, IE seems to no longer write additional information to it. Although the following article is talking about the index.dat file used for IE's caching mechanism, it seems highly plausible that it's what also causes the history problem.

See here for more information

This issue occurs when the Index.dat file in the following folder reaches a size of 16187392 bytes

Removing the file has allowed my history to be to logged as normal. Below are the steps required to delete the file.

Firstly, you'll need to open up a command prompt with administrative rights. So, assuming Windows 7:

1. Click the Windows icon to open your start menu.
2. In the search box, type: cmd
3. At the top of the list should be cmd.exe. Right-click it and select Run as administrator.
4. Press Yes from User Account Control if it pops up asking you if you'd like to run it.

You need to run it as an administrator so you have the necessary permissions to delete the file. Steps to delete the file:

1. Use the following command to change to the directory with the index.dat file:

   cd %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\History\Low\History.IE5

2. You'll need to close the browser in order to delete the file, so to get back here quickly, copy the URL to this question before closing the browser.

3. Run the following command: del index.dat /a:s

del is the command to delete a file. Appending /a:s to the command tells it to select files to delete based on an attribue (s in this case, which means system file).

Note: The \Low\History.IE5 directory will not be visible with the dir command unless you use dir /a. I'm mentioning this in case someone decides to look for it manually instead of copying the path from step 1.

In your Internet Options have you set it to "Delete Browsing history on exit"? Make sure that is unchecked.

Also in the Browsing history settings how many days have been set to keep history? (Default is 20 if I remember correctly.)