Tip: Disable RunOnce from Internet Explorer in your VPC images

If you’re working with VPC images that cannot connect to internet you might have noticed annoying thing at Internet Explorer. IE tries to connect to internet so that it could finish up the setup. It’s good if you CAN connect to internet but it’s really annoying if you won’t ever have network connection (and this happens typically if you don’t want to connect your VPC to network). And waiting for the timeout isn’t that nice (+ pressing the stop button doesn’t help that much).

This can be however changed through registry. Just add two keys (or modify existing) RunOnceHasShown and RunOnceComplete. Here is example .reg file for that:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main]
"RunOnceHasShown"=dword:00000001
"RunOnceComplete"=dword:00000001

After that you should have following keys under HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main:

image

And now if you launch IE it won’t try to connect to internet. You might also want to change your home page to be something simple like about:blank.

This was just small tip to make your development life a bit easier in the world of VPC images.

Anyways… Happy hacking!

J