Windows 7 Help and Support not working in online mode

Recently I came across the following issue:

On Windows 7 in Help and Support (Press F1 on the desktop), when switching to Online Help, the following warning appeared:

"You're not connected to online Help, which shows you our latest content. Check your Internet connection, and then try to connect to online Help again. If you still see this message, the online Help service might be temporarily unavailable."


At first I thought this was a proxy issue since the same image was working well in my lab.
I tried setting up the winhttp proxy using netsh but without luck.

Next I thought it was a firewall issue and checked which TCPView what process and what port Help and Support was using on a working machine. But again it could not be the firewall as the remote port used was http.

I ended up building a Workgroup machine on the customer domain, then joined it to the domain and added it to an OU where I blocked GPO Inheritance. Help and Support online was actually working....

After linking our GPOs with IE8 settings to my test OU - Help and Support stopped working so here was the root of the problem.

By gradually modifying the Group Policies settings that were "Enabled" and "Disabled" to "Not Configured" and trying to reproduce the issue, the problematical setting came to the light....  Drum rolls ...

Windows Components/Internet Explorer/Security Features/Mime Sniffing Safety Feature

The fix for us was to add HelpPane.exe as an exception to this feature.
This can be done either by adding a REG_DWORD value for HelpPane.exe and set it to 0 under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MAIN\FeatureControl\FEATURE_MIME_SNIFFING

Or to apply the same change through Group Policies.

That's it for today, hope you find it usefull.