IE7 installer woes cured

I had previously been unable to install the IE 7.0 beta on my laptop due to an unexplained error. When the final version came out I held off trying to install it on my laptop, but none of the other computers I tried had any problems at all. So tonight I thought I'd bravely try once more and of course it still failed.

After many more Googling attempts I finally found someone who had experienced similar problems and found it was a registry permissions problem. Several other pages had said the same but usually pointed the finger at anti-virus software - I'd already uninstalled mine (Grisoft AVG) to no avail. Fortunately this site directed me to look in the updspapi.log file (which lives in your Windows directory) for a more detailed error. Examining mine revealed the error message:

Setting registry value HKU\.DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\Zones\0\1806

So I pulled up regedit and tried to modify the value for that entry and it worked. Bummer!

So I thought about it some more and decided maybe it wasn't actually the current user but one of the other users that IE was messing with. So I looked at HKEY_USERS and tried that entry for each. After several goes I discovered that I couldn't modify either the DEFAULT user or the one called S-1-5-18 which is the local system account. So I went in an clicked at the top of the registry hierarchy for each of those users, pulled up the permissions and added full permissions for system and administrators (I actually made them inherit those permissions which achieved the same effect). Then I verifeid that I was able to change the 1806 entry in the IE zones, rebooted and tried the install again (for about the tenth time now).

Fortunately this time it worked and my Internet Explorer is now just a wee bit more secure and a wee bit less sucky than it was before.

The only question that remains in my mind is how on earth did my registry permissions get screwed up like that in the first place? This is the very first time I've ever modified a registry permission so I can only assume at some stage I installed something that did, and after uninstalling it the permissions never got reset. A lot of posts mention ZoneAlarm as a culprit for causing IE7 installation failures - maybe it was that since I did have it installed at one point but well over a year ago and I vaguely recall some kind of uninstallation problems.