WebJunction

Hi -

Take a look at these instructions for upgrading IE on a Gates Computer:
http://pacomputing.webjunction.org/do/DisplayContent?id=7258
Go down to the section titled:If your Start Pages Still Don't Appear

Because these were written for upgrading to IE 6, the specific keys may not be identical to what you see if you are using IE 7, but they should be close.

Dale

Hi -

Even with DeepFreeze off (and even if you gave all Admin permissions) the nature of the public profiles being set up as mandatory profiles means that changes you make still never get written back to the master copy of the profile. In fact if you had only logged off and back on instead of rebooting, you would have seen the same thing.

Normally, the way to deal with this kind of situation is to:
- DeepFreeze off of course
- Run the Public Profile Manager
- Remove the security restrictions
- Log into all, run ie, let it do it's thing, set settings etc.
- Log off all, and then right back on and open ie and verify that it no longer pops up.
- Now go back to exec and run the Public Profile Manager again and choose continue to install security.

If you have already done that, or it doesn't work, then you will need to make a registry change, but since I assume we are talking about IE7, the key you need to change is different than the one for IE6 that those instructions were for.

So you would unlock the profiles and log in to all and run regedit.exe, but then you want to navigate to this registry key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main
Change the value of the Registry string RunOnceHasShown from 0 to 1.

Dale

Just before going too far with this, I should mention that my standard advice for people having serious issues with the PAC Security tool is that long term they should remove it and use Microsoft Windows SteadyState instead. It is a direct descendant of the tool you are using, but is updated for things like IE7 that did not exist when the PAC Tool was made.

The fact that you have nothing in the Internet Explorer\Main\ registry key doesn't sound promising - when I look at my own computer, there must be about 30 values there. This is where the search page is defined, etc. Is this the way it looks even after IE7 has been run? This actually is maybe a mistake in my instructions so try this first:
- First thing. In exec, after removing restrictions, take a look in folder C:\Profiles\all\. You should see a file there named Ntuser.dat. If instead it is called Ntuser.man, that means the restrictions are not properly removed, and that is why your changes aren't sticking. In that case you may be able to simply rename the extension to "dat". It is probably worth a try anyway. But if that still doesn't work, it may mean you need to remove the profile completely and start from scratch to recreate. In that case, consider SteadyState.

- Also, when you go into all with it unlocked, before going to the registry, make sure you run IE7 once to save settings first. This is when those missing registry values get created. Once you run and close IE7, you should see the missing keys. The big question then will still be that if you make changes, will they still be there after logging off and back on.

Dale