You may have noticed that Windows Vista comes pre-subscribed to several Microsoft related feeds (Microsoft at Home, Microsoft at Work, and MSNBC). In an effort to clean up our image I started hunting down how Microsoft might be adding these feeds so that people aren't consuming these feeds and wasting bandwidth. It was also showing up in the default news reader in the sidebar which was annoying, but I will cover that in another post.
After several hours of unsuccessful attempts at preventing the feeds using the IEAK UI I tried to hunt them down in the resulting files used to brand IE. I searched through all the INS, INF's, and then started hunting it down in the registry to no avail. I finally gave up and fired off a couple of emails. Someone got back to me pretty quick and informed me the feeds were a resource of the iedkcs32.dll. Well that kinda sucks since I can't "hack" this dll to remove the strings because it is protected. So now what?
Ok, so, at that this point you have two option, you can delete the feeds using the feed api's post logon. This isn't a great answer, but will work. Unfortunately any time IE rebrands or a user uses the "Reset IE Settings" function you get the feeds back. It also means you now have to make code that runs for each user and to ensure you keep them gone you have to run it at each logon.
Thankfully from the set of emails I sent off I got a second possibility. For those of you using the IEAK to brand IE to your corporate setting you have the ability to trick IE into not processing the default feeds. To do this you simply add a bad feed at the end of the feeds section of your Install.ins and IE will stop processing feeds when it hits this. Since the default feeds are processed post custom feeds they are never added.
Hopefully if Microsoft fixes the workaround that I am using in a future update it will also provide a way to block these feeds natively.
Posted
Apr 04 2007, 06:36 AM
by
Josh Phillips
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