IE Hompage reset (Part 2)

Posted by Phil on May 21, 2008 under Off-Topic, PC | Be the First to Comment

Originally I had entered this information in the original post, but I felt that it needed it’s own post (the video limitations of the plugin’s that I’m using to display video also prompted this second post ).

Anyway, Remo commented (in an email) about using the Group Policy Editor (gpedit) to change your group policy restrictions to change your homepage (yes you can do that and a ton of other things that you can play with), this is another viable route to the homepage lockdown problem, but he also asked for a post on using regedit to unlock or change your homepage. I thought that maybe I would find the key that actually holds the homepage information and just edit that, but I found a different way that I think I like better (seems like it has less potential for system-wide destruction). So here are the steps.

1. Crack open regedit from the command line
2. when this opens navigate/drill-down to
   “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Internet
   Explorer\Control Panel”. Note that this will only exist if your current
   admin has locked down your computer… if you can’t find this route
   (meaning this tree does not exist) then DO NOT CONTINUE!
3. If you did find the path, then now is the time to make a backup of
   your registry file. To do this click on File->export->(make sure
   your selected branch is at the bottom, or click “All” for the entire
   registry) Save.
4. Now that you’re safely backed up, lets double-click on “HomePage”
   (it’s the blue REG_DWORD value in the right pane). In the pop-up change
   the value from 1 to 0, and viola! crack open IE and go to change your
   homepage the “normal” way and it will no longer be locked.
5. rejoice in your geekery…(not a required step, but it is recommended )

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