IE9 file downloads don't work

[Sheridan]

Our new Windows 7 PCs are thowing up lots of nice irritating issues, but one of the most frustrating is that IE9 doesn't work trying to download files.

On a website that staff have used for years, they are prompted to Open,Save,Save As, and no matter what they do the file isn't opened or saved. This is only affecting IE9 machines and all the other IE8 ones are fine. I did find a while ago something about disabling the group policy option to stop saving encrypted files to disk, but this was changed in the policies a good while back and we still have the problems!

It must be a group policy setting that is causing the issues as admins don't have the problem - but I've looked and cannot find anything that would causes this - anyone got any sugestions?

[psydii]

Does watching with procmon give any clues as to what might be happening to the file?

[Sheridan]

Can't see anything. The only other thing I've noticed is that and admin gets the long pen,Save,Save as Dialogue at the bottom of the IE windows, whereas the non admin user gets it as a 'normal' square dialogue in the middle of the screen.

[SYNACK]

Have you tried switching on compatibility mode for that site (IE7-8), I think you can push out compat mode setting by GPO.

[Sheridan]

I haven't tried compatibility mode yet - I have that disabled (but can be enabled by the user) at the moment. The GPO objects still show compatibility mode as IE7, even though the IE9 templates are loaded.

Edit - just tried as a student account and switched on compatibility mode, didn't have any effect at all. Same diagogue box and no response at all when you click Open.

[SYNACK]

I haven't tried compatibility mode yet - I have that disabled (but can be enabled by the user) at the moment. The GPO objects still show compatibility mode as IE7, even though the IE9 templates are loaded.

Edit - just tried as a student account and switched on compatibility mode, didn't have any effect at all. Same diagogue box and no response at all when you click Open.

Have you turned off the little notification bar things that show up yellow at the bottom of the window, it could be something like smartscreen filter complaining about a rare/weird file that is not downloaded often/has been reported as bad. If the notifications are hidden it may be waiting for permission unseen.

[Sheridan]

The files I'm testing with are simply Word files so nothing weird. Admin users get the yellow notification bar at the bottom asking the 'Save' etc, but non admin users don't so I guess this might be where the problem lies.

Edit: After some more poking about, it seems this is mainly occuring for javascript derived downloads, i.e the link is javascript call to open a file which prompts an admin user to get the yellow notification box, but a non admin gets the 'old' file dialogue box which doesn't work. Other file downloads seem to work ok for the non admin users.