Disable the user of Internet explorer through policies when called from HTML help
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by Stephane
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Published on 2010-06-08T13:05:26Z
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2010/06/08
13:13 UTC
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Hit count: 335
windows-server-2003
|security
|active-directory
|internet-explorer
|domain-policies
Hello,
I have a locked down environment where users are prohibited from doing, well, basically anything but run the specific programs we specify.
We just switched a program from using the venerable "WinHELP" help format to HTML help (CHM) but that seem to have an unwanted and rather dangerous side effect: when a user click on a hyperlink inside the HTML help, a new internet explorer window is opened and the user is free to browse and do terrible things to my server (well, not that much, but still...)
I have checked the session in this case and the IE window is actually hosted within the help engine: there is no iexplore.exe process running in the user session (and it cannot: it's explicitly prohibited).
We have disable all help right now until we find a solution. I'm working with the help team to have all external URLs removed from the help file but that is going to be a long and error-prone task. Meanwhile, I've checked all the group policies option but I have to say that I was unable to find anything that would prevent a standalone IE window hosted in a random process from running.
I don't want to disable WinHTTP or the IE rendering engine or anything of the sort. But I need to prevent all users members of a specific AD user group from ever having an IE window displayed to them.
The servers are running Windows 2003 and Citrix metaframe 4.5.
Thanks in advance
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