IE7 And runonce.msn.com

I always use FireFox. But a few Indian web sites force me to use IE (blast them). ICICIDirect and ICICI Bank are prime examples of this soft of foolishness. Imagine forcing people to use IE! Eecchhh!

Anyway, I am frequently forced to use IE. My PC at home and the laptop had IE 6.0 installed. No Tabs, multiple windows popping up all over the screen... eechhh... So I went and downloaded IE7. And the damn software keeps trying to access a web site called http://runonce.msn.com/runonce2.aspx. The first time this happened was on my laptop at work and I ended up with a settings page. Clicked through the idiotic thing and then forgot about it. The same evening I downloaded IE 7 to the PC at home. And guess what? The blasted browser keeps choking on the damn startup URL. I keep getting a blank page with a Script Error in the status bar. Tried changing the home page in the options dialog. No luck. The browser just ignores it and tries to load that blasted runonce URL.

I finally figured out how to nuke this behavior by chaning a Windows Registry setting:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main]
"RunOnceComplete"=dword:00000001
"RunOnceHasShown"=dword:00000001

If you don't find these settings in your registry, then you will have to create them as DWords. Worked like a charm after some initial experimentation.