A few weeks ago, it happened to me that after doing some unattended installations, when i first ran IE7 (all installations were Windows Vista) the Runonce page didn’t show up as usual. Instead it was giving out an error like this:

An HTTP error occurred while getting:

http://runonce.msn.com/runonce2.aspx

Details: “connect timed out”.

The reason is yet to be known but apparently the site is having problems, as i read on some sites yesterday that the problems is growing and it is intermittent, meaning that sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

I have a quick fix if you are running new installations or running Internet Explorer for the first time.

Simply copy this text and save it as somename.reg and double click on the newly created file to merge its contents to the registry.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

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

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