Deleting Active Desktop Content

[12Monkeys]

I have been looking all over the net for a way to resolve my problem.

On my work PC, I'm running Win 2000 Pro with administrative rights enabled. The company I work for has patched the OS a number of times to protect against viral / worm threats. I beleive this includes some controls on active content.

Over the last two years, I have added a fairly large number of items (web pages, images, OVC, etc.) to the Active Desktop. can hide them, but I want to the list up, and remove old items from the list of available active desktop content, but there is no option to delete.

Everything I have read, says to click on "Customize my Desktop" in that dialog (or in the Display under the Control Pannel), and use the web tab to delete items. Unfortunately I have no web tab, and even with various "tweaking programs" I have been unable to enable the web tab. I even ran gpedit from the command prompt and monkeyed with the setitngs, and this had no noticable affect.

If I could find a folder, or a registry entry that contains all these references, I could probably delete them manually myself, but I have been all over the C drive and can't find where Active (Desktop)Content is stored. (Must be a highly guarded Microsoft secret!)

Is there any way to locate these items and remove them (short of reblasting my install of Win 2000)?

 

[12Monkeys]

Hey, thanks for all the replies, but I figured it out, after several hours of hunting.

There is a key in the registry under HKEY_CURRENT_USER > Software > Microsoft > > Internet Explorer > Desktop > Components and then each Active Desktop item is listed as a seperate sub-key associated with a number startign at zero(presumably based on the sequence in which they were added).

If you want to trash all the junk in the list, even if you can't get to the Web tab in Display Properties, you can delete the entire Components key and the list of Active Desktop options will be completely empty.

Also, if you look down thru each item in the list, you can see the URL that is used for that item in "Source" and the "FriendlyName" is the text descriptor for the item.

Cheers!
12Monkeys

 

[raeveth]

hi please could anyone help me on something?

My web tab has also disappeared from my display properties (I am actually using WinMe on this machine but I have had this with other OSs)

How do I get it back??? Also the Active Desktop option has disappeared from the right-click menu, also I am unable to set internet properties other than by going through the control panel

thanks