Changing My Home Page... Problems.

[samwheale]

Hello everyone,

I recently upgraded my hard discs and had to re-install Windows (XP Pro) which all went fine as expected, but then I began to notice I had a few ‘annoying’ problems…

I couldn’t change my home page in Explorer for some reason? Just keeps coming up with the default one, MSN or whatever?

Secondly, the screensaver didn’t work, period. No matter what settings I applied?

I don’t know if they were interrelated, but I thought it was worth mentioning.

This was after downloading all the available updates and patches and re-starting etc.

So, I reformatted and re-installed Windows AGAIN (600GB RAID0 HD btw…) and before downloading any of the updates or installing any of my software, I changed the home page, for the purpose of experiment to ‘blank,’ which worked but after updating Windows, I am now back where I started – unable to change the home page again…

Weird thing is that on the second installation, the screensaver is back!

Anyone got any ideas? Is there an way of ‘hard’ resetting IE at all, or are there some new updates that I should avoid or something?

Any help would be much appreciated!

SW.

 

[linney]

Have you looked at any third party Security type programs that you are running to see if they are set to use the Default Home Page and/or not allow any changes?

Have you looked in Group Policy to see if "Disable changing Home Page settings" is being applied. See User Configuration/ Administrative Templates/ Windows Components/ Internet Explorer.

Make sure your options in IE/ Tools/ Internet Options/ Advanced are correct.

Uncheck the boxes for "Install on Demand" for IE and Other programs (two boxes).

Try running temporarily with the third box "Enable Third Party Browser Extensions" unchecked and see how this goes.

"This specifies that you want to disable features you installed for use with Internet Explorer that may have been created by companies other than Microsoft.
If you encounter problems with Internet Explorer that you cannot resolve, you can use this option to help determine if third-party features are causing the problems without uninstalling the feature. You must restart Internet Explorer after turning this option on or off."


If that stops your errors, you will know where the trouble is.

As far as recent updates are concerned, I have not heard of any linked problem.