The Red Bull Diary   Recent Posts
RSSRSS Friday Free Games
"Your 'reality', sir, is lies and balderdash and I'm delighted to say that I have no grasp of it whatsoever."
— Karl Friedrich Hieronymus, Freiherr von Münchhausen

Hacking IE Restrictions

We had a new Windows build rolled out to our desktops at work recently, and the sneaky systems administrators set my IE home page to the intranet home page and disabled my ability to change it. I never use our corporate intranet and always end up going to Google anyway, so I poked around a bit to see if I could hack around the restriction. I found a solution and figured I'd share for those who, like me, are suffering under the thumb of an oppressive infrastructure regime at their place of work.

To unlock your IE home page configuration, you'll need to edit the registry key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Control Panel. Any value under this key set to 1 disables the corresponding functionality in IE. In the case of your home page, the key is called (aptly enough) "Home Page". Simply edit the value to zero, restart IE, and you're good to go.

Comments on Hacking IE Restrictions
  Comment from Anonymous Anonymous at Wednesday, August 16, 2006 11:37:00 PM
I find it interesting that your company locks down your start up page but gives you access to modify your registry.

Hmmmmm....

H8 U
  Comment from Blogger Red Bull at Friday, August 18, 2006 6:19:00 PM
Well, I *am* a developer, so I need access to the registry. Your run-of-the-mill user probably can't run regedit.

In which case, of course, this tip would be useless, wouldn't it? Oh, well....

Pandora: My Favorite New Songs
LibraryThing: What I'm Currently Reading
Archive Links
Friends of the Red Bull


Sinfest by Tatsuya Ishida

Order of the Stick by Rich Burlew
The Red Bull Diary Is
The Red Bull Diary is the personal pulpit and intellectual dumping-ground for its author, an amateur game designer, professional programmer, political centrist and incurable skeptic. The Red Bull Diary is gaming, game design, politics, development, geek culture, and other such nonsense.