Internet Explorer, and its interaction with the overall Windows desktop experience, gets even more annoying when it dictates its control over your ability to access files on your local servers. I decided to look into the issue further after getting annoyed with constant prompts when trying to copy a file with the following message:
Internet Explorer
Do you want to move or copy files from this zone?
This prompt is a result of this setting:
You can get to this setting by going through Internet Explorer, then Tools, Internet Options. You’ll find this particular setting under the Security tab. For me, on the Internet zone, ‘High’ was the lowest I could go. This minimum level is also set by a registry key.
In order to be able to lower the bar to the security setting that meets your needs, you’ll need to do a little tweaking in the Registry. The default disclaimer goes out for whenever working in the Registry. Be careful what you change or you might have unforeseen results. If you follow my guide, you should have no problems, but I make no guarantee and am not responsible for any potential problems that arise.
Go to Start, Run… and enter:
regedit
Next, browse to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\Zones3
There are other zones as well, 0 through 4. You want to edit the Internet settings which happens to be under Zone 3 for my setup. You can confirm what zone is where (whether it is My Computer, Intranet, Trusted Sites, Restricted Sites, or Internet) by looking at the key under each number zone titled DisplayName. For example, Zones3DisplayName shows ‘Internet’. That means we’re in the right zone to be editing settings.
To change the minimum level that we could adjust the slider to, you want to alter the ‘MinLevel’ key to be the hexadecimal value corresponding to the following list:
0x00010000 Low Security
0x00010500 Medium Low Security
0x00011000 Medium Security
0x00012000 High Security
After you make this change you can close and re-open Internet Explorer and adjust the setting in Internet Options or you can continue editing in the registry to change the setting. To change the current setting, just alter the ‘CurrentLevel’ key to be a hexadecimal key that corresponds with the level you want, again, based on the list above.
For example, if I want to make the minimum level ‘Low Security’ and the current level ‘Medium Security’, I’d make the following two changes in this location of the registry.
MinLevel 0x00010000
CurrentLevel 0x00011000
There is a similar registry key that you can alter to only affect the currently logged in user located in a similar path:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\Zones3
To read more about related registry settings for IE security zones, visit this Microsoft KB article.