IE 8 won't launch

[SamR]

When my facility was still on a Windows peer-to-peer network, I was playing around with my office PC to see whether I could block certain programs from launching. No surprise, I was able to change local policy to stop Internet Explorer. With the test completed and satisfied, I removed the restriction. But, IE still won't launch . . . sort of.

If I click on the IE icon under All Programs, I get an error message that says, "This operation has been canceled due to restrictions in effect on this computer. Please contact your system administrator." If I receive an email through MS Outlook that contains a link and I click it, I get the same message. Same thing if I type "iexplore" into the Run menu or drill down into the IE8 folder and launch iexplore.exe from there. However, if I click on the IE icon on my Desktop or if I click on a certain IIS program icon on my Desktop, IE launches with no error. Furthermore, once IE is launched this way, the scenarios above no longer generate the error message.

If I look in Local Policies, there doesn't appear to be any restrictions in place.

After I started having this problem, a friend of mine got into the Registry and "enabled" something (I think). I have no idea what or where, though. Once he did, I no longer got the error message. This was only a temporary fix, though. Probably until I rebooted the machine the next time.

Any ideas where I can enable IE in the registry, or maybe even a more permanent solution?