Vista Parental Controls Slows Down Zune Marketplace

I’m a huge fan of my Zune and the Zune Marketplace. I have a Zune and my two daughters do as well. I’ve owned several iPods but I just love my Zune more; especially the subscription option for music. $15/month for all the music I want is fantastic. Yes, not everything is included in it and if I stop paying I lose the music but so what. It’s far cheaper in the long run and allows me to explore a lot more music that I otherwise would. I think this is a great way for artists to gain exposure. Anyway, this isn’t the point of the post.

Each of my daughters has their own login to Vista and I’ve setup Parental Controls on their login. This caused a severe performance slow down on the Zune marketplace. Searches and downloads were painfully slow. Running under a full admin account everything worked great. I found one potential solution where the person added 20-something URLs to the allow list. Yuck! That’s not a solution in my book. If one URL changes or another gets added in a software upgrade it’s back to the drawing board. I dug into the Parental Controls stuff in Vista and found a solution. There’s a list of programs that Parental Controls will completely ignore. I added zune.net to the list and viola everything works great. There’s no GUI for this in Vista so it requires editing the registry directly – this means do this at your own risk…

Using information from this site: <www.bleepingcomputer.com/tutorials/tutorial139.html> I added a new value for c:\program files\Zune\Zune.exe under the hive: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Parental Controls\HTTPExemptions. This worked like a charm. What this does is exclude zune.net from Parental Controls. I think this is the best option as I can still control browser access but not impact Zune marketplace performance. It's unfortunate that MSFT doesn't provide a GUI to control this list of programs.

As I said, I love my Zune and so do my girls. They’ve already downloaded a ton of music and exploring a whole new world!

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 03, 2009
  PingBack from http://www.codedstyle.com/vista-parental-controls-slows-down-zune-marketplace/

• Anonymous
  March 29, 2009
  Thanks for the info.  One correction though, the name and value for the registry which worked was c:program filesZuneZune.exe (not Zune.net).  We were getting an incomplete list of songs for most marketplace albums on the kids accounts using parental controls until I made the registry entry.

• Anonymous
  March 30, 2009
  Thanks for reporting the error. I fixed it.

• Anonymous
  November 11, 2009
  Ever since I installed Windows 7, my Zune marketplace has been unbaribly slow. I was able to resolve this issue by unchecking "Automatically Detect Settings" in the /Control Panel/Internet Options/Connections/LAN SETTINGS. Thought I would share incase anyone else is having that issue.

• Anonymous
  December 10, 2009
  Hi there, I tried your trick on my Windows 7 (64-bit) machine to get the zune marketplace to speed up, but didn't quite work. 10 minutes later, this page is found that solves it: http://forums.zune.net/0/9/554175/ShowPost.aspx#554175