BenV's notes

Obviously dealing with windows isn’t my favorite, but it comes along as part of the job.

Today my boss wanted to view some car site in internet exploder, because “Some sites don’t show properly in Firefox, Internet Explorer does a better job sometimes”. So I was like “You mean garbage sites that still write IE specific html… oh never mind, show it :)”

First he showed his problem in Firefox. As far as I’m concerned it looked like a failing search engine on the site and nothing html related, but whatever.
Then I opened that site in Internet Explorer for him, but it wouldn’t show because it needed flash, which still wasn’t installed (since they never use IE). Fine, I installed flash. The site worked for me, but for his user the flash plugin wouldn’t load.

After cursing for a while and making sure some obscure HKLM/Software/System64Wow32Node{DB02703-YOURMOM-0328745}/WTF/Adobe/Garbage keys were absolutely readable by normal users, I tried it in another normal user account that I just freshly created. And it worked.
Back to his account: still no dice, plugin wouldn’t load. Meh.
Checking all the usual places like making sure the plugin wasn’t disabled did hint that something was weird, because he couldn’t adjust his security zones. (he could however add sites to the zones). This is weird, because the new user could change it. Also, his zones were set to a higher standard than the rest of the machine’s users.

Finally, after dicking around in the registry for hours (and with google which was of no use as usual) I found the problem:
HKCU/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Internet Settings/Zonemap/IEHarden = 1.
Where the heck did that come from in the first place?
And they say linux is bad with arcane configuration files.