I have a client running IE8 on XP. He is using a Citrix based app that requires encrypted pages to be saved to disk. Each time he boots, the relevant security setting has been reset, and he has to go in and change it again.
The setting, on the advanced tab of internet options, under security, is "Do not save encrypted pages to disk". This is not entirely relevant, as the problem extends to all security settings. These are the ones that are stored in the registry under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Internet Settings
I have managed to narrow down the exact point that this happens to the first time IE8 is started after boot. If changes are made subsequently they persist until the machine is rebooted. The settings remain after a boot, but are reset as soon as IE8 is started. Changes made manually in the registry suffer in the same way.
The same is not true of changes to the homepage etc. These changes persist.
The machine is not in a domain, I don't believe Group Policy is causing the problem. Logged in as a different user the same thing does not happen, so it's user specific. Moreover, the settings that it gets reset to do not appear to be the defaults (for example Do not save encrypted pages to disk becomes checked, where a default IE install seems to have this as unchecked).
The same thing happens if I start IE with no add-ons. I have checked registry permissions, reset IE, removed and reinstalled IE all to no avail, cleared cache, cookies etc. What else could be causing these settings to be reset?