I’ve been struggling for a whole night to fix my Internet Explorer’s home page. I will mark down my experience here:
The problem: the home page of IE keep changing back to some website after I set it as blank. Changing the home page in registry shows access denied. Changing the privilege of the home page key in registry shows access denied. (even though I run regedit.exe as Administrator) Uninstall IE8 and install IE9 doesn’t fix the problem either. I can’t find any spy software or whatever harmful program.
After crazily searching throw Internet for a whole night, I find a simple solution:
1. Right click the key you want to take ownership of.
The key for home page of IE is HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\Start Page
And I find the whole folder has problem of changing privilege, so the key I want to take ownership of is HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\
2. Click Permissions – Advanced – Owner Tab
3. Under Change owner to, click the new owner (your user account), and then OK.
After that, I can successfully change the privilege of the key to full control. And then I can change the Start Page to what ever I want. And I find that changing the home page in IE directly success, too.
I guess the problem was that some hijack program changed my home page of IE and changed the owner of the IE Main key in registry, resulting in that any change to that folder, including changing through IE itself, fails. A wrong owner of registry key is not a virus, so no software can detect the problem. That’s why I can’t find anything using any software.
