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Fixing Stubborn Security Issues in Vista – Part 2

by Jason Bean on August 20th, 2008

Continuing from my previous issues on security settings in Vista, here’s the follow-up.

Today my mother-in-law instant messaged me and said that when she tried to click on a link in her email in Outlook, it would give her an error.

This operation has been cancelled due to restrictions effect on this computer. Please contact your system administrator.

My initial thoughts were that the message was in her Junk Mail folder in Outlook and the link functionality was being disabled. More discussion let me know that that was not the case and there was something else going on somewhere.

I tried to work through a couple of more options, but nothing seemed to work. I said I’d stop by the house later today.

More and more searching on the Internet led me to more answers that seemed very closely related to the problems I was experiencing earlier.

• re-registering a DLL
• fixing a corrupt registry key file (that didn’t exist in my registry)
• resetting Internet Explorer to default settings (which still didn’t work)
• Installing Firefox and ditching IE7 (thought about it but not the best solution in this case)

I tried a variety of those options and nothing worked. In fact, at one point I started having the problems again with Print Preview displaying HTML source display that I was struggling with in Part 1 of my problems.

The last option I came across was just different enough I figured I’d have to try it. They suggested reviewing my “Set Program Access Defaults” options and making sure that “Microsoft” was selected for everything.

The challenge was that I would select the Microsoft option and apply the changes, but they wouldn’t be remembered. Every time it would keep switching back to the “Custom” setting. Weird, I know. After trying that  couple of more times I decided to look a little closer at the custom settings and see what was being selected. Reviewing each item and what was chosen, I manually told each custom setting to use the Microsoft software whenever possible. After applying those changes, they stuck.

One thing I did think though was that installing Firefox probably would have fixed it. I’m sure it would have forced IE7 to really test it’s default settings and clear anything it needed to to restart itself fresh.

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POSTED IN: Home User, Internet Explorer, Outlook, Security, Software Errors, Tech Support, Training, Windows Vista