Setting a Home Page

I work at a middle school and the students' logins are limited by policy. The Internet Options in IE are mostly grayed out, including the field to set a home page. Unfortunately, several game pages the kids go to change their home pages to something other than what the district wants them to use.

If I log in with my administrator access (we use 2000 and XP), I can change my home page but of course, I can't change theirs.

Is there another way to change the Home Page other than through Tools?

Thanks for any help you can give.
Tracy

 

If you are an administrator, you should have access in order to change or control whatever the students are doing. You can go to Start, Control Panel, Internet Options, and change the Homepage there, but that may only do the same thing as you've been experiencing.
Once you get the pages changed back, maybe this tool will help.

 

Yet another thing to try:

But first what OS are these computerers running?

If NT based (NT 4, 2k, xp), you can set the homepage, then migrate to a particular key and set the permissions to only admin, instead of everyone.

The key in question that needs to be changed is:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\Start Page

Make sure that the key Start Page is set for what you want, then RIGHT CLICK ON MAIN (to the left) and select permissons. Change this permissions to administrators only.

You MAY need to do this within HKCU also.

I have no idea how your network is setup. Whether you allow roaming profiles, or whatnot. If these are Pro machines, then setting a policy will fix this.

So, before I get into the nitty gritty, we need to know what OS you are running.

 

Steve

 

I'll check that program out, thank you!

 

We're using primarily XP and 2000. I will try the registry entry to see if that works.

Here are a couple of problems though - we're also running Novell and Zenworks, which sets the policies. Windows actually sees them as administrators and Zenworks limits them.

Most of the time I will be trying to reset the homepages when they are NOT logged in. So I'd like to be able to stop the students from changing the home page at all, or have it reset back to my default when they log back in. But since I'm not sure I can do this in Windows, so I really just need to know how to change the home page (and backgrounds and other settings) for individual users when they aren't there.

Does that make sense?

Thanks!
Tracy