Disabling Home Page change (IE6/Windows XP)

Topic

New Reply

Is there a way to disable the ability to change the homepage setting? We would like to set all homepages in our firm to one address, and not have people subsquently change it to whatever they like. All users are Administrators in Windows XP with IE6. Thanks in advance!

Reply | Quote

Replies

Forgot to mention: we are on a Novell network, so using policies to disable is not an option. I was hoping there’s a registry hack of some sort…

Reply | Quote

The Group Policy Editor can do that. However, the registry setting is controlled here:

HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwarePoliciesMicrosoftInternet ExplorerControl Panel
HomePage=(DWORD)0x00000001

For more info: WinGuides

Reply | Quote

A tiny VBScript run at startup can hack the registry.

Reply | Quote

Under [HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwarePoliciesMicrosoft…..the only option is SystemCertificates.

Am I missing something here?

Reply | Quote

Yes and no. The “policy restriction” values are NOT there by default — you have to add them.

But, as Jefferson points out, a savy user can easily get around your best efforts to block them. Obviously, if YOU can modify the registry, so can all the other “Administrator” users.

I think XP’s regedt32 allows you to selectively lock keys — and that might be your solution to making this stick. (I don’t use XP, so this is only a guess.)

Reply | Quote

As suggested by jscher2000, a start-up script like the following should accomplish what you seek. Make sure that you verify the registry key – as it is based on a Win2K installation. Users may well get tired of having to reset the Home Page every time they log on.

Sub RegistryWrite(KeyName, ValueName, ValueData, ValueType)
	ValueType = UCase(ValueType)
	If ValueType  "REG_DWORD" and ValueType  "REG_BINARY" then ValueType = "REG_SZ"
	Set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
	WshShell.RegWrite KeyName & "" & ValueName, ValueData, ValueType
End Sub

Call RegistryWrite("HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftInternet ExplorerMain", _
    "Start Page","[your URL goes here]","")

HTH

Reply | Quote

Thank you, unkamunka, for your suggestions. However, the goal is for the user to not be able to change their homepage from what we set it to. Of course, if they figure out how to hack the registry, they can switch it, but I doubt that’s going to happen.

I’ve successfully created the new key under HKEY_CURRENT_USER, and it’s working (ie, my ability to change my homepage is non-existent–it’s all greyed out). However, creating the exact same key under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE does absolutely nothing (which I’ve tested by logging in as someone else to my computer). So, for our IT department to apply this to all 200+ workstations, we’d have to login as each individual user, which would require getting passwords, etc. Hoping we don’t have to do that.

Any idea why it works for the current user, but not local machine? Thanks again for all of your help!

Reply | Quote

The suggestion that jscher2000 and I were making was that this script became part of the log-in verification procedure – set-up on the server so that it ran every day as someone logged in. Thus, if someone did hack the registry – or change the Control Panel applet – they would have to do it every day after they had logged on. There was never any question of having to log on at 2000000+ machines. Provided you can set up the script for the new key, it may be just as well to run that at log on anyway.

If the key was a per machine setting, then an Admin could be disabled from having their own page. Whether that is why the registry key doesn’t work under HKLM is another question.

Reply | Quote

Ah, I misunderstood! So, we create the key, put it in login script, and to change it the user would have to reset the DWORD value every day… sounds good to me! Although I wonder how many Help Desk calls I’ll get when we do this…

Reply | Quote

AH… but ideally you want the script to change BOTH the “HomePage” value and the “Start Page” — that way the user has to modify the registry twice!

(To avoid confusion, note that unk’s code does not change the HomePage DWORD — it changes the Start Page String value.)

Again, a really savy user will just make their own script (or .reg file) that can override this — but now you are dealing with someone you will likely never be able to ‘control’!

Reply | Quote

Sorry, I guess I was a bit vague on how to use the VBScript. I’m assuming that Novell doesn’t literally support this syntax, but the user’s box should have cscript.exe in the default path and should be able to run it the same was one would shell a batch file at startup (of course, this is NT syntax):

start /wait cscript servernetlogonSetHomePage.vbs //NoLogo

Reply | Quote