For those of you running Windows XP Service Pack 2, you have likely come across this problem at least once. You download a picture, document, or program you need, and before you can do anything, up pops a window, warning you of the (so-called) dangers of opening the file. “Warning,” the window advises, “This file is from an unknown publisher. Opening this file may damage your computer.” As helpful as this proposes to be, it is annoying for those downloading pictures of their vacation or their co-worker’s business document. For those continually annoyed by this, we offer this fix.
To remove these pop-up notifications, go to “Start”, right click on “My Computer”, click “Properties”, go to the “Advanced” tab, and select “Environmental Variables”. In User Variables, click “new”, and add the following: SEE_MASK_NOZONECHECKS, and give it the value 1. This will disable the pop-up security checks.