IE opens blank new tabs instead of your home page

You have  masterfully designed custom home page for your Internet Explorer (IE).  All of a sudden, only first tab displays your home page.  All other new tabs in IE open as a blank page.  What happened?  Something is changing IE settings  back to “A blank page” ?

This particular fix for this article was tested on Win7 x64 with IE9.

In a few words, you need to delete this registry entry

vprot.exe

from location

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run

A little bit more radical solution is to run a 3 line script on Startup to delete all intruding entries from all 3 possible Startup locations in Registry.

This solution is absolutely great, because it prevent “friendly” software to run “friendly” programs without your knowledge.  However, I would recommend this solution only for more advanced users, who can attribute each deleted line with a particular program and purpose, and made a conscious decision about getting rid of it.

For example, on computers with Wi-Fi connection, you might need keep some startup programs, to give you connectivity while computer is loading.

Also, you can (and should) backup all 3 location that you about to clean up into a text file with extension REG.

If you are done with all the preparations and backup, we are now ready for the script:

 REM *** 01 Clear Current User ***
 REG DELETE HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run /va /f
 REM *** 02 Clear 32-bit Local Machine ***
 REG DELETE HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run /va /f
 REM *** 03 Clear 64-bit Local Machine ***
 REG DELETE HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run /va /f

Place a shortcut to this batch file into your Startup folder, and test it.  However, there is a difficulty.  Not for XP. Starting from Vista and up. If you  run this script without Admin privilege level, your registry values will not be updated.  If you set privileged level to “Run as Admin”, your Startup will not load it (for your protection).  So you only can run it by personal clicking on a shortcut.

I would like to know, if someone already found a solution to this protective annoyance?  I am not talking about something radical like turning off UAC altogether.  It would be imprudent.  For now I will be just running this script manually from time to time, and wait for a magic tip from our readers.

And I still did not solve this problem for Firefox.  It now opens an eclectic collection of old visited pages instead of my time-saving home page.  We will fight with this problem in the next article.

How to Automate a High Privilege Script at Startup?

I found a solution the very next morning.  Instead of adding the cleanup script to your Startup folder, simply schedule a new task to run “At system startup”.  Here you can specify “Run with highest privileges” option.  Perfect!  Thank you Thigh Master!