How to Stop Windows 7 Popup – “The publisher could not be verified. Are you sure you want to run this?”
When you try to run an installer in Windows 7 such as an .exe there is a warning message say that the program does not have a digital signature (From Microsoft, Expensive!) and it may be harmful.
This is really annoying especially if you are such that, what you open is always safe. If you want to stop this message appering every time read on to find the tweak.
Instructions
- Open Internet Explorer, Open the Tools Menu and Internet Options
- Click Custom Level under the Security Tab
- Change the Launching Applications and Unsafe Files to Enable
After this Internet Explorer will show an error message (about:SecurityRisk) when you open it. So you will probably want to do the following
Disable The Information Bar
- Edit the Registry (If you don’t know how to then DON’T this can seriously break your computer
HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Security\
(DWORD)DisableSecuritySettingsCheck (Set to 1)
Let me know if this helped you! Leave a comment.

thanks m8
Your fix worked for me, but the registry hack resulted in the icons on the task bar going blank. I deleted the edit to the registry and all is right with the world. (I don’t use IE8, and I don’t see the security error (error message (about:SecurityRisk).
Thanks, been trying to get rid of these popup messages on a 2003 server for a few days now. DisableSecuritySettingsCheck worked perfectly!
- Mike