IE Bombs when accessing sites as standard (non-admin) user on Win2

I have a situation where IE is quitting instantly when a user that isn't in
Domain Admins tries accessing any website (internal or external).

Server is 2003 Terminal Services with SP2
Client doesn't appear to matter

Symptoms:

Normal user double-clicks IE which opens, then immediately closes.

This is occurring on 5 out of 8 servers in a TS farm!
I've found that if I set the default home page to "about:blank" IE opens
fine, but as soon as I try to access *any* page at all, it closes instantly.

o No errors that I can see in any of the Event Logs.
o I've created a new *local* user to rule out an errant GPO
o I've checked Local Policy and found nithing to be defined at all
o I've tried moving one of the servers into the "Computers" container to
disable as much Group Policy as possible (temporarily)
o I've reset IE security settings to default to no avail
o I've disabled the Proxy to no avail

Explorer.exe *also* appears to be affected to some extent in that, if I can
get it running from a standard user account, it basically bombs out/locks up.
This tells me there's something related to DLL's etc. not quite right.

Can anyone suggest a way forward?

Regards,

Paul

"PaulK" <> wrote in message news:1BB0B120-B72E-4D22-958A-...
>I have a situation where IE is quitting instantly when a user that isn't in
> Domain Admins tries accessing any website (internal or external).


So it sounds like a permissions issue.


>
> Server is 2003 Terminal Services with SP2
> Client doesn't appear to matter
>
> Symptoms:
>
> Normal user double-clicks IE which opens, then immediately closes.
>
> This is occurring on 5 out of 8 servers in a TS farm!
> I've found that if I set the default home page to "about:blank" IE opens
> fine, but as soon as I try to access *any* page at all, it closes instantly.


*Any* page? Are you sure? E.g. have you checked to differentiate
between local and remote access? BTW to see how far it is getting
compared with your Domain Administrators' case you could try running
Fiddler2 and ProcMon. E.g. would a restricted account be allowed
to use the dnscache or otherwise do DNS lookups? Etc.


>
> o No errors that I can see in any of the Event Logs.
> o I've created a new *local* user to rule out an errant GPO
> o I've checked Local Policy and found nithing to be defined at all
> o I've tried moving one of the servers into the "Computers" container to
> disable as much Group Policy as possible (temporarily)
> o I've reset IE security settings to default to no avail
> o I've disabled the Proxy to no avail
>
> Explorer.exe *also* appears to be affected to some extent in that, if I can
> get it running from a standard user account, it basically bombs out/locks up.
> This tells me there's something related to DLL's etc. not quite right.
>

> Can anyone suggest a way forward?


I'm not clear on the connectivity involved with a terminal server scenario.
You would probably get a more informed answer from a newsgroup
or forum which specializes in that platform.

Otherwise, could this be another instance of registry hardening
that you might have to subvert to use your server the way you want?

http://www.msfn.org/win2k3/


>
> Regards,
>
> Paul


Good luck

Robert Aldwinckle
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