I ran into a case recently where I had to hack together a set of drivers for my touchpad on my D820 to get it such that I could set options in the mouse control panel. This seems trivial until you realize I am now running the 64 bit version of Vista and that Dell doesn’t have such a driver released. I downloaded the 64 bit version that Dell does have from their support site, and extracted it and installed it. All seems fine, but then, for some reason I was getting prompted on each and every boot to allow the binaries to load into memory. I am not quite sure why, but the underlying cause seems to have been that Vista detected them as unsigned binaries that were surreptitiously copied into my Program Files directory and thereby un-trusted. Checking the box to never warn me about these binaries again did nothing, nor did trying to edit the file properties and unblock the file. If you aren’t familiar with the option to unblock a file from being executed, then let me fill you in. Some files, when they are downloaded from the internet into your Program Files directory have an alternate stream added onto them that marks them as unsafe. The next part is that Vista won’t allow you to edit this property when the .exe is located in the Program Files directory. To get around this, I had to copy the .exe files out to my desktop, edit the properties on them one at a time, unblock them, and then copy them back into the Program Files directory overwriting the originals. Now, on boot, the drivers and applications load into memory without warning me, just as desired. Some enterprising folks out there have written java scripts to edit and remove this file attribute, and others have used the Sysinternals tool Streams to remove these attributes, but neither worked for me. Hope this helps those who run into it. If you have repeatedly launched a program in Vista, only to get warned every time about launching it, I’d recommend looking into this property.
