BrianJarrett.com

As a rule I don’t use Internet Explorer; I use Firefox instead. The reasons for this are outside the scope of this article. I do, however, use IE for work-related stuff (it’s our company standard) when necessary and I use it when testing my website. One of the most annoying things about Internet Explorer is a nagging feature which reminds you that Microsoft feels your security setting are too lax. One of the main issues I have with this is that it appears to be all or nothing. If I let Microsoft choose my security settings then every damn time I try to open an image or zip file from a shared drive on my internal network I get a nag message forcing me to say “OK” before I open it. This is unacceptable since my internal network should be a trusted zone.

To get rid of the nag message every time I open a file from my network I selected “Tools > Internet Options” from Internet Explorer. I then chose the “Security” tab then the “Custom Level” button. In the “Miscellaneous” section I set “Launching Applications and Unsafe Files (not secure)” to “Enable (not secure)”.

This fixes the nag when you open a file with Windows Explorer but it creates another nag message on Internet Explorer on every page you visit. Microsoft has decided that they don’t want to allow you to simply click a “don’t remind me anymore” button and make this browser annoyance go away easily. There is, however, a fix for those of you annoyed by this and willing to muck with your registry.

Disclaimer: I cannot be responsible for any damage you might do to your system in any way, shape, or form because you followed this advice. This requires you to modify your system’s registry a process which, if followed incorrectly, could render your system unusable.

Having said all that, I’ve made these changes myself to my own system and everything seems to work just fine. Here’s what you do.

• Click the “Start” button.
• Click “Run…”
• Enter “regedit” in the text box and click “OK”.
• Go to “My Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Security
• Once you’re in that folder right click anywhere in the right pane and then click “New”, “DWORD Value”.
• Name the new DWord “DisableSecuritySettingsCheck” and set the value equal to “1″.
• Close the registry editor.

Here’s a screen shot: Disable Security Check in IE 7

Once again, I’d like to thank Adam F. for turning me onto this nice little work around. Hit me with a comment if this helped you; I’m curious to know.