Vista's Data Execution Prevention

[JSKY]

Data Execution Prevention (DEP) in Vista

If you just turned it on and never configured it, it could cause IE7 to close down thinking something isn't right. Here is a small understanding of DEP

Data Execution Prevention (DEP) is a set of hardware and software technologies that perform additional checks on memory to help prevent malicious code from running on a system. DEP is enforced by hardware and by software.

The primary benefit of DEP is to help prevent code execution from data pages. Typically, code is not executed from the default heap and the stack. Hardware-enforced DEP detects code that is running from these locations and raises an exception, when execution occurs. Software-enforced DEP can help prevent malicious code from taking advantage of exception-handling mechanisms in Windows.

Thus... If it thinks something is not right when you land on possible websites encoded with malicious coding... It will cause IE7 to close down instead of allowing something bad to happen.

If you are logged on as an administrator, you can manually configure DEP to switch between the OptIn and OptOut policies by using the Data Execution Prevention tab in System Properties.

The following procedure describes how to manually configure DEP on the computer:

1. Click Start, click Run, type sysdm.cpl, and then click OK.

2. On the Advanced tab, under Performance, click Settings.

3. On the Data Execution Prevention tab, use one of the following procedures:

• Click Turn on DEP for essential Windows programs and services only to select the OptIn policy.

• Click Turn on DEP for all programs and services except those I select to select the OptOut policy, and then click Add to add the programs that you do not want to use the DEP feature.

4. Click OK two times.

This had me going for a while, shutting down IE7 untill I figured out that DEP was the problem. Well not really a problem, once I understood what was going on.

JSKY