How To: Disable Internet Explorer Enhanced Security Configuration (IE ESC)

One of the first things I needed to do when we were configuring our latest Windows Server 2008 was to turn off the Internet Explorer Enhanced Security Configuration (IE ESC).


IE ESC reduces the exposure of your server to potential security attacks from Web pages that do not belong to the Local intranet zone or the Trusted sites zone. This is great on production servers as IE ESC makes Internet Explorer literally useless and as such is a great feature of Windows Server 2008 however when you're using this server as a Terminal Server it becomes extremely painful. 

Anyway, below is a quick guide on how to disable IE ESC but please note you should only do this if you really know what you are doing and have a proxy in place to block your users from accessing certain web pages that might cause you network issues.


In Windows Server 2003, one had to uninstall the corresponding Windows Component. In Windows Server 2008 however, this doesn't work any more  Clicking on the root folder in Server Manager, scroll down to the Security Information Section and click 'Configure IE ESC'. You can turn off IE ESC for Administrators and/or for users. The latter obviously only making sense in our case where we needed to do so due to the Terminal Server environment.

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