Mapped Network Drives in Internet Zone

[XBRMann]

I've got an odd one for you all. I have about 100 XP SP2 workstations in a Multi-Site AD environment. I rolling out IE7 to our machines and I have noticed an strange behavior on the IE7 machines that I cannot seem to fix. I have the security zones setup in IE as the following (I've anonimized the names):

Intranet Zone:

• *.parent.net
  
• child.parent.net
  
• *.child.parent.net
  
• servername.child.parent.net
  

Essentially I put all machines in the parent domain and the child domain in the Intranet Zone. Now the weirdness beings, when I type in the UNC "\\servername.child.parent.net\share" windows explorer tells me it is in the Intranet Zone, however when I map a drive to that same UNC path windows explorer tells me it's in the Internet Zone.

I found a MS KB (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/303650) that states UNC paths with dots in them (IP Addresses & FQDNs) will always appear in the Internet Zone even though you have defined them in the Intranet Zone, but then why are my UNC paths displaying as in the Intranet Zone? I assume this is because I have enabled the "Intranet Sites: Include all network paths (UNCs)" in my IE Settings GPO.

Has anyone run into this and figured out a way around it, or am I stuck? I would just reference all my network resources by their netbios name as the KB suggests, but we're in the multi-domain environment and accessing servers from the parent domain requires the FQDN.

Thanks for the help!

[cluberti]

You are correct in your assessment, the GPO you've set is causing the unintended desired behavior with UNC paths, whereas the mapping drives behavior is what is supposed to happen otherwise. The way that urlmon works, is that if your path (UNC or otherwise) contains dotted parts, you're not going to be in the intranet zone. It would be better to place these in the TRUSTED SITES zone.