The Richter Scale^®

I have spent the last week setting up over a half dozen new UPSes, a new multimedia receiver, and three high end Windows XP Media Center Edition computers - two fully loaded Dell XPS 710 systems and an HP x565 Digital Entertainment Center. Seeing as these were new installations, I decided to bite the bullet and go ahead an accept Microsoft’s Automatic Update suggestion to install Internet Explorer 7 (IE7).

Well, one of the other things we do here at the Richter high-tech household is use a central file server (running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3), and that file server includes some applications we run on local systems. Well, Microsoft, in it’s desire to help the average user avoid running bad programs has implemented additional security features as part of IE7, features that get really annoying for more advanced users. In particular, when you run applications off a server on a LAN, IE7’s default settings cause a dialog box to pop-up entitled “Security Warning”, and asking you to verify you really really really want to run the program in question.

One application we use in turn spawns calls to a Windows version of the PERL scripting language, dozens of times, and each time we’d get a warning.

We used Google to try to find a solution, and the closest we got to a solution was here. But the real answer was in the comments to that blog post, and not the blog post itself.

In any event, if you have a similar problem, including for the error “Publisher Code Not Be Verified”, try this solution to see if it makes it go away. A concise summary of the solution follows.

First, get to the Internet Options control. Three ways to do this: 1) Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Internet Options; 2) Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Security Center -> Internet Options; and 3) IE7 -> Tools -> Internet Options (works only if you have the menu bar enabled).

Once there, click on the Security tab at top, then in Local Intranet, click Sites, and then unclick “Automatically detect intranet network”. Voila.

Nice of Microsoft to make it so easy to locate and resolve. Not.