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 This is yet another
undesirable change being forced on you by Microsoft; it came
with XP Service Pack 2 and Vista Service Pack 1. Basically, it
means that anything you download or copy from another computer
through your network is now marked as potentially dangerous.
What a load of crap!
The worst part of these "enhancements" is that Microsoft
doesn't tell you it has buggered your system: they just make
these changes totally unannounced, and the first time you find
out about them is when something unexpectedly fails. What a way
to run a business.
I found that this affected my SyncBack utility that I run
several times a day to keep various directories in sync on my
network. I downloaded the latest version of PC Tools Anti-Virus
and SyncBack said it got an "access denied" error.
There are two ways to get rid of this. Investigation uncovered
a new field in the Properties window. When you right click the
affected file, and choose Properties, you now see a security
message at the bottom of the window that reads:
Security:
This file came from another computer and might be blocked to
help protect this computer.
There is no "might be" about it, it is
blocked, so the message is wrong.
This is related to the problem described in the section Open
File - Security Warning. You downloaded the file or copied
it from another computer on your network and now Microsoft says
you are not allowed to access it.
You have two choices. Switch to Linux or Mac.
No, actually, you have these two choices: click the Unblock
button, and that changes the security setting for that single
file. If you happened to have downloaded 137 files, you have
to do this 137 times because Microsoft, in its infinite wisdom,
did not provide a method to make a mass change to this setting.
To disable this stupidity for future downloads, you have to
run the Group Policy Editor, which should be in the Administrative
Tools section of Control Panel but isn't. (Why not? Only Microsoft
knows and they ain't talking.) The only way to invoke it is:
Start
Run
type gpedit.msc
press OK
Then navigate to
User Configuration
Administrative Templates
Windows Components
Attachment Manager
Then right-click on the line Do not preserve zone information
in file attachments and choose Properties.
Click on Enabled and then OK. You don't need
to reboot.
Now how do you get rid of the block on all the files you downloaded
for the last few months? The only thing I can think of is to
copy them to a drive with FAT32 because this security setting
is only implemented on drives with NTFS. If you copy them to
a FAT32 drive, the security is removed, so when you copy them
back to the NTFS drive, they will have no security setting.
But first, you have to identify the blocked files and there
is no easy way to do that, except by date.
And by the way, if you have Windows XP Home or Vista Home,
they are both crippled versions of Windows and neither has Group
Policy Editor, so you are stuck with this problem.
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