How to reset the content advisor Password in Internet Explorer

I received an email from Heather describing a problem that she encountered. She enabled the content advisor option in Internet Explorer but lost the password that allowed her to configure or disable the content advisor again.

The so called supervisor password is defined when you first activate the content advisor. The funny thing is that the password is still set even if you uninstall and install Microsoft Internet Explorer again.

There is however an easy method to disable the content advisor password and it is a typical example of weak security.

If you can look it up on the Internet your kids can as well. All you need to do is delete two keys in the registry to remove the supervisor password and disable the Content Advisor in Internet Explorer

Now to disable the supervisor password go to the following registry key:

HKEY LOCAL MACHINE\SOFTWARE\MICROSOFT\Windows\Current Version\Policies\Ratings

Delete the entry "key" and "hint" and restart your computer afterwards. The content advisor is not protected by a password anymore and you can change all settings or disable it without providing a password.

Update: The easiest way to get there is the following. Use the keyboard shortcut Windows-R to bring up the run box of the system. Enter regedit in the box and tap on the return key to load the Windows Registry Editor. You may see an UAC prompt that you need to accept before the editor appears on your screen.

All that is left to do now is to navigate to the structure using the sidebar folders. Once there, right-click each of the keys and select the delete option from the context menu. Just delete both keys and restart Internet Explorer to remove the password protection from the Content Advisor.

Update 2: If you do not like editing the Registry manually, you can try and run the Content Advisor Password Remover application instead to remove the password from the feature.

Additional information about the feature are available on Microsoft's Technet website.

Update 3: Please note that Content Advisor is not included in Internet Explorer 10 anymore.