If you have a newly installed IE7 (not company preinstalled), or reverting back from a beta IE8 install. You will have an annoying redirect to this URL (http://runonce.msn.com/runonce2.aspx) every time you time open IE, regardless of what your homepage is setup as. First it foes to this page: (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=54834 –) and redirects itself to the runonce.msn.com page.

The page itself is harmless and actually supposed to be help full for a newly installed IE7, so that you can customize your IE setup. But after you choose your settings not that it only doesn’t save the chosen options but also goes back to the same time whenever you open IE. Needless to say, it very annoying. This is how the runonce.msn.com page looks like:

Short Solution: copy & paste this three line in a notepad and save it with .reg (ie IE7.reg) extension and run the reg file after saving it. This should automatically edit the necessary setting needed to fix this problem.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main]
“RunOnceComplete”=dword:00000001
“RunOnceHasShown”=dword:0000001

Long Solution: Run regedit from Start –> Run –> regedit. From there, go toHKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main and you will see the obvious entries that needs to be changed, you can add the above entries manually:

The problem seems to with third party anti-spyware which are doing it’s job by preventing you from editing your registry settings from URL, and doing it’s job very good.

-Ranjan