Well, as I said, I'm cleaning up a machine previously used on an enterprise network. It used to have McAfee on it, I uninstalled it... HOWEVER, McAfee lied and did not really uninstall, but it no longer showed up in the program list. I tried the consumer uninstall tool to see what happened:
http://service.mcafee.com/FAQDocument.aspx?id=TS100507
and it told me I still had an Enterprise version of McAfee on the system!!. I ended up at the manually uninstall corporate version page:
https://kc.mcafee.com/corporate/inde...ent&id=kb50602
and balked at the extent of work needed. So I cheated a bit.
- I went to Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Services and found a McAfee/Network Associates service and disabled it.
- I used several registry cleaner tools (Wise, Ccleaner, "Free Window Registry Repair") and JUDICIOUSLY deleted a lot of related keys that showed up as errors in one or the other.
- rebooted....
And.... I can now download exe files as I wish in both IE and Firefox.
YMMV and remember to back up the registry before mucking around with it. A system restore point is also a good idea. Good luck.