Disabling IE9 First Launch Web Page

I had a customer request to turn off the first run upgrade web page that shows up after upgrading to IE9.  It took me a little while track this down, so I thought I would post what I found out so it is easier for future people searching for this.

Most of the results from Google said to disable it by using the Internet Explorer Prevent performance of First Run Customize settings GPO, but that didn’t work. It turned off the wizard, but didn’t stop the webpage from coming up.

I found a few posts that recommended setting the IE9TourNoShow registry key to 0x1. I tried that and it didn’t work for me either.

Finally I did a quick comparison of the registry keys before and after launching IE9 for the first time and found one additional registry key that existed before the change – “First Home Page” That registry key pointed to a Microsoft web page, which turned out to be the one that kept appearing.

Removing that registry key along with adding the IE9TourNoShow key did the trick and the normal operation was returned. So, here is the reg file contents to undo the IE9 first run web page.

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main]
“IE9TourNoShow”=dword:00000001
“First Home Page”=-

Enjoy!