When you install Windows 2003, by default Internet Explorer is configured to be very secure. Things like ActiveX controls are blocked from being installed or even used within Internet Explorer, and every time you go to a web site, you are prompted to add the site to the trusted list.

Basically if you have to do any maintenance in an emergency or download a driver or software within Internet Explorer on a Microsoft Windows server, it is very cumbersome. This is caused by the Enhanced Security Configuration setting for IE.

To make IE run like it would on a desktop pc, you have to turn off Internet Explorer Enhanced Security Configuration for the user account :

• Log on as the user with local administrator rights on the server
• Click Start, click Run and type in regedit.exe
• Locate registry subkey:
  HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\Zonemap
• In the details pane, right-click IEHarden , click Modify, type 0 (zero) in the Value data box, and then click OK.
• Now locate registry subkey:
  HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings
• In the details pane, right-click IEHardenIENoWarn , click Modify, type 0 (zero) in the Value data box, and then click OK.
• Exit Registry Editor, and launch Internet Explorer.

Before you can use IE you need to do one more thing.

• Within Internet Explorer go to the Tools menu and click Internet Options.
• Click the Advanced tab
• click Restore Defaults
• and now click OK.

Go ahead and close IE and launch it again. You can now browse web sites like you would using IE on a desktop PC.

Please note that IE, (Internet Explorer), is now vulnerable to downloading malicious content. So only surf websites that you fully trust. Also, make sure your antivirus software has the latest updates applied for further protection of the server.

Finally this is meant to be used to go to web sites to perform server maintenance like downloading drivers or software for the server. Do not turn off Internet Explorer Enhanced Security just to "surf" the web on the server. If you do, you will higher chances of infecting your server with a virus or spy-ware.

for further reading on this subject you can go to  upport.microsoft.com .

Troubleshooting a PC is generally not that hard as long as you take things slowly and focus on different parts of the PC. The worst thing you can do when you troubleshoot your PC is to use the random approach, and start making changes to your PC. In the end, you could have a PC with more issues than you started.

Take a second and identify what it is that is not working on your PC. To say it is working slow, or not "acting" right is not going to help you. Think of it in a detail sense, like maybe for example when you open a certain window the PC freezes up. Once you have written down the problem, look at the rest of your PC and see if the problem you wrote down in detail is the only problem or are there other problems also. If the issue is only within an application, it may not be your whole PC, but the application that you are using specifically.

After you have written down all your issues that your PC is having, sit back and think about what changes you have made to your PC. Have you installed new hardware like a video card or network card? Maybe you installed a new piece of software. After all, there is a lot of "demo" software available on the web. And it is tempting to just install software with no consideration that the software may not work on your PC.

If you have recently made hardware changes to your PC, remove the the hardware and the drivers that you recently installed. After you removed the hardware and drivers, see if your issue went away. If it has, then go to the manufacturer’s website, search to see if there is a new driver or software fix to resolve the issue. However, if the issue has not gone away, do not reinstall the the hardware that you removed, continue troubleshooting. Later, when you fix your PC you can go back and reinstall the hardware.

One option you can try is to do a system restore. (this can fix drivers issue, and software issues)

To do a system restore, you click on Start, All Programs, Accessories, System Tools, click system restore. Select the option that says " restore my computer to an earlier time ", and click Next. You will now see a calendar showing all of the system restore points of your important system files. Select the restore point just before you first noticed that your pc was having an issue. If you are not 100% sure you can always restore back to your current configuration. Follow the prompts.. You will most likely have to reboot your pc or laptop when you restore back you system files. If the problem has gone away, great! otherwise continue reading on. If you did a system restore after you removed the hardware, try going to the vender’s website to download the newest drivers and reinstall the hardware.

If you have not installed any hardware recently, or at least you have removed what you have recently installed onto your PC. Try to think back to see if you made any changes to the configuration of your PC. Did you go into the options of the application? Maybe you made a small change to the settings of the hardware. Again, if you did, try to remember what it is that you did and revert those changes back to the way they were. You may have to use last known configuration and system restore to revert back those changes if you forgot what it is that you did. Reboot your PC and if the PC is using windows press F8 during the boot process. When you see a menu, select restore to last know hardware configuration. Hopefully this will revert the changes to the way they were before you changed them.

Now we are at the point of troubleshooting the PC hardware. This can be the tough part of the troubleshooting. However, there are things that you can do that do not require expert PC knowledge. If you are receiving disk not found errors either during the boot process or while you are within the operating system, then more likely than not the hard drive is or has gone bad. If you do not have any video, try plugging the monitor into another pc . Does the monitor work now? Then maybe the monitor is fine but the video card is bad. Now, I am assuming you did not make any software conjuration changes. Or maybe at this point you just remembered that you did make a setting change for the video card.

I could walk through each hardware component but that really would not help you if you have another issue again and I did not list the hardware you are having issues with. Instead think about the piece of hardware that you are having issues with. What is interfacing with the Part. Like for example the monitor is hooked up to the video card. Is the Video card bad? Try to swap out parts when possible. More and more people now a days have more than one PC in their home, and often one that is not being used anymore.

Don’t forget about any possible warranties or extended warranties that you may have on your PC. Many people forget two years later that they bought a 3 year warranty.

Instead of installing the full Windows 2003 Administration pack, you may want to install only certain parts of the pack like for example the DHCP Administrator MMC add-in.

To install, register, only the DHCP Admin snap-in, you will need two files dhcpmgmt.msc and dhcpsnap.dll

These two files can be found in the Windows 2003 Administration pack from Microsoft.

Copy dhcpmgmt.msc and dhcpsnap.dll to c:\windows\system32

Open a console window by clicking on Start, then click on Run and type:

regsvr32 c:\windows\system32\dhcpsnap.dll

.. and then click on OK.

You should get a prompt saying that you successfully registered this DLL. Your DHCP Admin snap-in is now installed

To test. Launch MMC.exe by click on START, RUN and typing in MMC.exe and then click OK.

Click on File in the menu bar and chose Add/Remove Snap-in.

Click on Add

Scroll down to DHCP and click on Add and the click on close. You should see DHCP in the left pain. If you do then the install worked.