At the moment the company I work for is in a transitional phase between switching from our old Windows XP environment managed by Altiris Deployment Console to a new environment which will utilise Windows 7 Enterprise x64 and SCCM 2007 R3. I've been the tasked with being the technical lead on the implementation of SCCM and also have been working away on creating the Windows7 build and SCCM OSD task sequence. At the moment the build is almost finished, but there are still several issues being found by our IS pilot team. Due to the issues and the scale of the task required to ensure compatibility with older systems we are taking our time trying to get it right. The other major piece of work we have is a full Active Directory and group policy restructure, all of these things take time and require in-depth knowledge of how each department in the business will use the new software you will provide.
Just now I'm left working with two different AD/GPO structures and two user operating systems to support and it's proving to be a headache. Luckily, one of the smartest things we did was to put a freeze on change control to the old environment, but this means that we are stuck with older software such as IE7, with no way to upgrade without breaking compatibility with older browser based add-ons and custom intranet solutions powered by Workflow on Lotus Domino. All of these issues take time to fix and our full Windows7 rollout can only be started once Workflow has been replaced by SharePoint.
Some people who don't work for large organisations will say "Pleh! Just do the upgrade" but my business environment does not allow us to make changes on a whim. It's amazing how complicated changing something as simple as a browser plugin can be when you have 2000 users breathing down your neck if it doesn't behave exactly as it used to!
Today the issue I had was with IE add-ons. A call came in via the service desk and they were unable to resolve. The call originally was logged as "Flash player doesn't work". The service desk had tried to install the latest version by using an Altiris job I had prepared earlier, it seemed to install fine but when the user went onto YouTube it asked them to install the latest version of Flashplayer. It didn't take me long to check the add-ons menu and find that all add-ons are marked as disabled and marked as being "managed by your administrator". Strange, I don't remember setting that in a group policy, so I reset all IE settings to default, same issue. I went to the run prompt and started iexplore.exe in case it was running with in no-addon mode and it wasn't. I then checked the machine and user OU to see what policies had applied to the system and then checked the relevant group policy, no sign of add-ons being managed by policy. I logged off as the user and on as my domain admin account and found add-ons still disabled and greyed out. This was starting to become a head scratcher, I decided to follow a process of elimination and remove IE add-ons that may have become corrupted, after I ran out of add-ons to remove I still had the same issue - no luck! Next idea, a uninstall and reinstall of IE7, to make matters worse I am in Glasgow, Scotland and the system in in Sydney, Australia - the remote control speed is abysmal and I know that a reboot will be required to complete the IE re-configuration; this is a major problem since this was a laptop with a power on password enabled at bios level and no user available at the other end to type it in.
At this point I delayed the reinstall/repair idea and went to the registry and mess around for 15 minutes. A quick trip to TechNet and I'm no better off, I find a key on TechNet all pointing to:
HKLM \SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Restrictions
NoExtensionManagement DWORD set to 1 and not 0.
But these settings are not present on my system. After reading a few blogs I still can't find anything so it's back to regedit. Eventually I found this key :
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\policies\EXT
Restricttolist DWORD was set to 1 when it should have been set to 0.
Just in an instant Its working fine and I'm left wondering how the heck this could have been set to 1 in the first place, why this isn't documented anywhere? I will be really glad to see the back of IE7.
Andrew
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