Disabling IE ESC on a Windows Server 2008 R3 RDSH server

We had a very hard time trying to disable IE ESC on a RDSH server running 2008 R2. All the usual registry fixes people talk about in forums did not work for us. ESC got disabled for admins but not not for users.

Eventually I found this setting in the registry which did the trick:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Terminal Server\Install\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\ZoneMap]
“IEHarden”=dword:00000000

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Active Setup\Installed Components\{A509B1A7-37EF-4b3f-8CFC-4F3A74704073}]
“IsInstalled”=dword:00000000

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Active Setup\Installed Components\{A509B1A8-37EF-4b3f-8CFC-4F3A74704073}]
“IsInstalled”=dword:00000000

Note that we are setting the policies on the computer level…NOT on the user level. Other than these three settings, nothing else is needed.

Oh Yes! we did have the delete the profiles of users on the RDSH server and also from the roaming profile store. After that users are not getting any IE ESC blocking pop up messages

I hear that we got so many problems with IE ESC because IE ESC was turned off after the Remote Desktop Services role was installed on the server. I am going to test out this theory when I do my next RDSH server install.