Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Bulk unblock in Vista

Vista's UAC suspicion of downloaded code (and other files) manifests itself as a warning on each such file, cropping up when you open them. I usually see this when I download sample code, open the VS .sln, and collapse under the slew of warning windows.

Ideally, my antivirus software would have a setting to remove these values after a successful scan, or at least prompt me. It doesn't.

The fix, like so many fixes, comes from SysInternals. The underlying problem is that the downloaded files have been associated in NTFS's mind with the "main unnamed data stream". Si's streams utility strips off this association, and will do it recursively:

streams -s -d .

The "." for current directory is necessary.

I must have Googled and re-learned this a dozen times.