IE Error: “Could not complete the operation due to error 800a03e8”
Posted by William Diaz on April 5, 2012
This might present itself as a generic IE error: “Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site <URL>. Operation aborted” 
You will need to check the option to Display a notification about every script error in the Tools > Internet Options > Advanced tab to see the details as this dialog box will prevent the error from being revealed otherwise. Afterwards, reload the page and you should see the details: “Could not complete the operation due to error 800a03e8.” 
Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer 8 for Windows XP (KB2618444) should address this issue, as well as various other javascript issues with IE7 and IE8. It also addresses the HTML Parsing error blogged about earlier here: HTML Parsing Error
Windows Explored 
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