IE7 (Internet Explorer 7) can be a pain.

Not terribly surprising is its tendency to “take over” and re-direct you to a Microsoft web page even after you have set your home page to a blank page or to some other specific page after installing it (or upgrading from an earlier version.

But even resetting the default home page wasn’t doing the trick, as every time I started IE7, it would still redirect to a page that would tell you to about how utterly fantastic the latest release of IE is (the final redirected URL is http://runonce.msn.com/runonce2.aspx).

I found a fix for it here which requires a little fiddling with the Windows Registry.

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The Backstory:
I have recently received a new laptop — running Windows, of course — since our development environment at work is completely sold out to Microsoft (thanks to government contracts) with the exception of our database product. And with the bosses looking to integrate *everything* in a MS shop, I won’t be too surprised when the order comes down from above to start swapping over our code to accommodate Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL).

Until then, I will probably be spending an inordinate amount of time finding all the weird bugs inherited from the “official corporate drive image” and adapting the machine to my user preferences. And while that sounds critical, I have to hand it to our local tech support guy, who did a much better job with this image than the one he did two years ago when I got the previous machine I was issued.

Of course, in an imperfect world, some things do get by. One of them is a glitch with Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 (hereinafter: IE7). Now it would be an understatement for me to say that I do not like using IE7 (and much more so its previous iterations) as even to this day, it has a lot of peculiar quirks. IE7 is much more web standards friendly than its forebears, but I really don’t have much of a choice in developing for it - and exclusively so in the case of some legacy web applications we have developed for a captive audience (not by our choice, but our customers have disallowed their users from using any other browser except IE6 or 7).

When I installed IE7 on my old machine a year or so ago, I was able to reset my default home page by going to (in IE7) Tools » Internet Options and replacing the http://runonce.msn.com/runonce2.aspx (or whatever the default value is) with about:blank. It worked just fine, and never saw the annoying message again.

Fast forward to yesterday, where I start up IE7 (after resetting the default page to about:blank ) and … I am not greeted by my default blank page, but that blamed MSN customization page.

Gee, thanks MS, for making another fine product that doesn’t quite do what you tell it to.

The Fix:
The reason for this is found in a missing entry from the Windows Registry.

First, hit your [Windows Logo] key and select Run from the menu.
Type regedit in the command line (this will open the registry editor).

For those not familiar with the Registry Editor, it has two panes - the left side shows the registry as a series of directory folders much like Windows Explorer does files. The right side pane shows the keys and sub-keys (once the left side is drilled down to a particular key).

It should go without saying, but take great pains here not to mess with settings here unless you REALLY need to do so, as you can possibly disable your software or even the operating system.

A typical installation of Windows has the following top-level keys:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT
HKEY_CURRENT_USER
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
HKEY_USERS
HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG

Everything we will need to be concerned with happens in HKEY_CURRENT_USER, so we will drill down to find the following:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main

Here, look for the sub-key RunOnceHasShown on the right-side pane. Double-click on it, and change the value from 0 to 1 if needed. Click OK to close the dialog.

Now, look for the sub-key RunOnceComplete. If it is not present, you will have to create it by right-clicking on some white space in the right-side pane and pick New » DWORD Value from the context menu. Name it RunOnceComplete and set its value to 1.

Close out of Regedit and re-start IE7.

Now that you’ve done that… you should be able to enjoy a more annoyance-free Internet Explorer 7.

Of course, if you don’t absolutely need to use IE7… you could time and trouble by downloading and using Firefox 2.