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This page has an unspecified potential security risk.

With Vista (and probably XP and IE7) right clicking on a zip file on a network share brings up an Internet Explorer dialogue:

This page has an unspecified potential security risk. Would you like to continue?

It appears that the OS thinks that your network share is in the Internet Zone rather than the Intranet Zone. This is easily fixed by:

  1. Control Panel > Internet Options > Security.
  2. Select Local intranet > click Sites > Advanced.
  3. Type your server name into the textbox (e.g. If the server is called FileServer just type FileServer) and click Add.
  4. Click Close > OK > OK.

20 Responses to “This page has an unspecified potential security risk.”

  1. Barry Says:

    Thanks, that worked a treat.

    I’m on Vista Ultimate. I’d browsed to a folder on my other XP machine and was simply right clicking on a ZIP file there and then got this unspecified potential security risk message from Internet Explorer! Weird!!

    Cheers,

    Barry.

  2. fultzjap Says:

    Thanks John. You made my morning!

  3. Morv Says:

    I’m using XP and had this problem browsing another XP machine on my network. Helpful information.

  4. Chris Says:

    Thanks for the tip.

    Once again Microsoft fails to get even the most basic fundamentals to work properly.

  5. Nick Beck Says:

    I’ve got this exact issue. I’ve added our file server everywhere in the security settings, tried naming it every which way, but the machine flatly refuses to open anything without moaning about it. The start menu, my docs, app data etc are all redirected back to a central location, and guess what, the ‘my docs’ folder, desktop shortcuts, quick launch etc are all ‘potential security risks’…. it’s driving me mad! I had this before and got rid of it, but this time it just won’t go away!

    Help!!!!

  6. FoamingToad Says:

    I had some reservations as I was using a drive letter mapped to the server and thus wasn’t sure if this would work, but this worked perfectly. Many thanks.

    F_T

  7. Ben Says:

    I use DFS and i had to put my NTDS domain in to access net drives correctly as I use redirection of all shares.

    ie

    \\bubba.local\data\billybob

    might map to \\fileserver\billybob and \\fileserver2\billybob

    but I had to put bubba.local in the server name referenced in original post.

  8. James Says:

    Thanks John.

    This sorted out my problem. I was panicking for a minute or two. I thought I might have got a virus infection on my NAS server!

  9. markus vincent Says:

    I’m stupid…how do I find out what my server name is?

  10. John Plummer Says:

    The path to the share will be something like \\servername\folder. In this case servername is what you need to enter.

    If you have mapped the share to a drive letter the drive will probably be called something like

    folder (\\servername)(X:)

  11. Lachlan Hunt Says:

    This won’t work for me. I’ve got Windows XP running in VMWare Fusion on Mac OSX, and it has a path of “\\.host\username\” to access my home directory in OS X. But the security preferences is refusing to let me add that because of the dot in the name. Also, it’s not dependent on IE7, as I still only had IE6 running in that virtual machine. There must have been some other security update that made the change. If I knew which one it was, I’d just uninstall that particular update.

  12. Mike Says:

    I typed in the drive letter as the server name and it converted it to file://*.servername.domain

  13. Arttu Says:

    Here’s a simpler solution. In Control Panel, go to Internet Options> Security> Custom Level> Miscellaneous. There’s an entry titled “Launching Applications and Unsafe Files (not secure)”. Set it to “enable”.

    Worked for me!

  14. Richard Says:

    oh god you rock.. thank you

  15. Harry Says:

    Nice fix, worked like a champ. U-Rock grad?

    -Harry

  16. Noob Says:

    Yep that stops that annoying message popping up when clicking in windows explorer MS windows network and going to other pc’s in my house with public folder sharing to get files.I just enter the other computer names and it dont pop it up no more.
    Thanks.

  17. Jadawin Says:

    Something was changed that would allow websites to be ‘marked’ by IP address; I have 192.168.*.* in my zone, and that USED to work. :)

    I have letter-mapped drives, so heading to My Computer and putting in the name that appears in the ()s before the drive, works like a charm! Thanks for the info, and thanks for being so high on the search engine. :)

  18. poop Says:

    I cant get it to work- whats a server??

  19. John Plummer Says:

    In this case the server is just the computer where the files are stored. I do think that a minimum amount of technical knowledge should be required before changing windows security options though.

  20. Mohammed Says:

    I get this error message when i sign out of yahoo messenger…plz help me. is this some kind of a virus or a phishing software??? i havent got this message until a few days ago.

    Plz help folks!!!

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