IE Branding

This is a nuisance - your isp (or some other parasite) provides you with a branded version of Internet Explorer. This is exactly what one of my isp's (cpcug/Millkern) did.

Well, its been over 6 years, I have upgraded IE several times, and their irritating brand is still present.

Basically

The IE title bar says Millkern Internet Explorer
The rotating globe icon flashes the cpcug logo

Personally, I find both of these to be extremely irritating and unprofessional.

It turns out that this data is stored in the registry

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main

  BigBitmap    = C:\WINDOWS\CPCUG1.BMP
  SmallBitmap  = C:\WINDOWS\CPCUG2.BMP
  Window Title = Millkern Communications, Inc. Internet Explorer

On another machine (Win 98) not poluted with this crap, these keys are completely missing. Using the Registry Monitor, only Window Title was checked (and not found), there were no checks for the 2 bitmaps.

Obviously, Microsoft approves of this ... otherwise they would have replaced these keys when you loaded a new version.

Author: Robert Clemenzi - clemenzi@cpcug.org

IE Branding

URL: http:// cpcug.org / user / clemenzi / technical / ie / IE_Branding.html