Why can't I change the security settings on IE 6.0?

I have a copy of my research group’s web site on the hard drive of my laptop. We use it to show what we are doing when internet access is not easily available. The web site contains a number of short MPEG movies. When I click on the link to the movie, IE 6.0 beeps and up pops the little yellow bar saying “IE has restricted this file from showing active content.” Clearly my security settings are too high. So I bring up the “internet options” control, go to the “security” tab, and select “security level.” Sure enough, its set to “medium,” which includes prompting for downloading active content, which I suppose a movie player is. So I grab the slider and set it to “medium-low” which no longer requires prompting. And I get a pop-up box saying “the recommended level for this zone is medium, please set it to medium or higher.” And it resets the security level back to medium!

What the fuck? I’m logged in as an admisnistrator, its my damned content, I know its safe, how do I tell this #&$!ing program to display it without prompting?

And yes, I normaly use Firefox, but I still want to get IE to do what I want, if only because the little bastard needs to submit to me.

I too would like to know the way around that.

Here’s the real kicker – when I am surfing my web site on the actual internet, IE does NOT warn me about anything – its only when I’m getting the files off of my own hard drive that I keep getting these security pop-ups.

It’s called “local machine zone lockdown” and was introduced in XP SP2 to improve IE security (preventing web pages from accessing local files). You should be ok by going to Internet Options, Advanced tab, and under the “Security” section, checking “Allow active content to run in files on My Computer”.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/community/columns/improvements.mspx