Disable “These files might be harmful to your computer” warning?

Question

I keep getting this irritating warning when copying files over the network:

These files might be harmful to your computer

Your internet security settings suggest that one or more files may be harmful. Do you want to use it anyway?

I am copying a file from \\192.168.0.197\c$ (home server) to my local machine which is at \\192.168.0.4.

How do I turn off this meaningless "warning"?

Answer 1

I found a fix by changing "internet options" -- so I guess Windows is detecting the "internet" as my own network.. sigh.

• Click Start / Control Panel / Internet Options
• Click Security tab.
• Click Local Intranet
• Click Sites button.
• Click Advanced button.
• Enter the IP Address of the other machine or server and click Add
• Click Close

This worked for me, but it's a bummer I have to manually enter IPs here.. it would be nice if Windows could detect this is a local network file copy and skip the irritating (and pointless) warning about "dangerous" files.

Answer 2

Using Windows 7, I added my IP address with a wildcard:

10.55.25.*

Now all the ip's in this range are part of the "Local Intranet".

Answer 3

If you want to do this in Group Policy, this quote may be helpful to you.

You can control this with Group Policy, as well. Use gpedit.msc and drill down to

User Configuration → Policies → Administrative Templates → Windows Components → Internet Explorer → Internet Control Panel → Security Page

Enable "Intranet Zone Template" with the Low option.

Then enable "Site to Zone Assignment List" and use the Show button to add your "sites" (servername, servername.domain, ipaddress - the values you enter depend on what name or IP you use to access the share) with a value of 1.

Lastly - and this is the most important step - drill down one folder in gpedit to "Intranet Zone" and enable for "Launching programs and unsafe files", choosing Enable from the drop-down.

Close gpedit, reboot or run gpupdate /force and enjoy no more annoying Windows Security dialogues!

From the bottom of http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/fi-FI/w7itprosecurity/thread/35ca8f9c-5e69-4b7f-a002-0d72fa0dc14b

Answer 4

I believe you wouldn't get the warning if you used the netbios name of your home server instead of the ip address. If you use the ip address or say the fully qualified dns name of the remote computer it doesn't recognize it as being in the intranet zone. the other option as mentioned earlier is to manually add it to the intranet zone list.

Answer 5

We recently put in a new server using DFS and I was having this same error. I ended up putting in:

" \\\servername.local.?"

After clicking add, it then showed:

file://*.servername.local.

I tried the * verses the ?, but that was not allowed.

Answer 6

The other solutions here didn't work for me on Windows 7, but I found one that worked: remove Internet Explorer through Add/Remove Programs and then Adjust Windows Features. Unclick Internet Explorer 8. No more nag dialog!