How to disable IE9 add-on performance notifications, you Idiots

Within days of an almost painless deployment of Internet Explorer 9 across the site, I began to spot this annoying little git popping up on some of the older machines:

This is a new and well-intentioned feature of IE9 called the Add-on Performance Advisor. Yes, a lot of add-ons are bloated, steaming, piles of manure, which is precisely why I don’t permit my users to install them. Unfortunately, just having Java on many of my older machines is enough to trigger this, and if kids go around disabling that, the next thing that happens is I get a lot of calls from ICT lessons when all the sites they still use that rely on Java don’t work.

Annoyingly, removing the user’s ability to disable add-ons via Group Policy did not suppress the pop-up.

To banish it forever, you need one of the new Group Policy settings for IE9. Specifically, Windows Components\Internet Explorer\Disable add-on performance notifications.

To get these new settings to appear in your Group Policy editor, you’ll need to copy the updated inetres.admx and inetres.adml from a machine with IE9 installed into the appropriate folders in your Group Policy Central Store. Before you ask, there is no standard ADM template, because IE9 isn’t available for Windows XP, you idiots. UPDATE: As a commenter pointed out, ADM templates do actually exist, because some people are still stuck in the dark ages of using Windows 2003 domains.

About The Angry Technician

The Angry Technician is an experienced IT professional in the UK education sector. Normally found in various states of annoyance on his blog. All views are those of his imaginary pet dog, Howard.

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sparkeh says : 2nd April, 2011 at 20.20
Just wondering why the rush to roll out IE9 so close to release?
Did provide you with something you desperately needed?
- AngryTechnician says : 2nd April, 2011 at 20.44
  Our web-based MIS uses a LOT of JavaScript, and performance in IE8 was terrible on our older machines. I’d previously Chrome installed as a workaround, but I was sick of it being difficult to patch and not working with roaming profiles.
  
  We started testing the RTM the day it launched across both curriculum and admin machines, and after 2 weeks we went for it across the site. So far, we’ve found only one minor problem.
joe90bass says : 4th April, 2011 at 20.10
Interesting that you mention printing issues in your post above. Since upgrading to IE9 on my home PC I’ve had issues printing as well! I first noticed on Saturday when trying to print out a map from Google Maps. Now again tonight I’ve had issues tring to print an email from OWA2007, In the end I worked around it by printing to office document writer as a tif and then printing from there – somewhat poor quality though. Even printing to a pdf file failed, the resulting document came out as about 50% random characters….

Time to visit add/remove programs and go back to IE8 until resolved I think!
uhhgg says : 7th April, 2011 at 3.26
how do you do this for a personal computer with no group policy e.g Vista
- AngryTechnician says : 8th April, 2011 at 14.45
  Actually, non-domain machines can have Group Policy settings defined. Go to Start > Run and type gpedit.msc, then hit OK, and the Local Group Policy Editor will open.
Mark Scholes says : 10th May, 2011 at 13.48
Actually there is, you idiot.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=7624a447-b55a-45a9-808f-53aac7d157fb
- AngryTechnician says : 10th May, 2011 at 17.57
  Ahhh of course, for Windows 2003. I forgot some people are still stuck with that.
Alan Terrill says : 19th January, 2012 at 11.52
I can’t find the setting for add-ons on my server. I have ie 9 installed but the inetres.admx has a date of 10/6/09 and a size of 3.005k. The inetres.adml is dated 14/7/9 and size 532kb.
I found a newer version on the web with a date of 11/5/11 and a size of 1,564. I tried replacing the admx with this one but when I did any of the policies that used the admin templates started showing errors of the type “Encountered an error while parsing – file policies\policydefinitions\inetres.adml and ‘an appropriate resource file could not be found for …\inetres.admx’

Can anyone who’s got this working with IE9, let me know the date of the admx and adml files? Or is there something else I should be doing apart from just copying them in?
- The Angry Technician says : 20th January, 2012 at 17.49
  Your original inetres.admx file certainly seems the wrong size. My inetres.admx is 1.52 MB while the inetres.adml is 384 KB. If you replace one file, you have to update the other with the one that matches, which I think is what caused your error message.
  
  Perhaps try the inetres files from a workstation with IE9 rather than rely on the server ones?