Today was a nightmare. I had a customer that was unable to access secure web sites. They were using Internet Explorer 7 and this happened after a very bad virus. I cleaned up the virus using HiJack This, OTMoveit, and a few other programs. (See a quick guide on how to remove spyware programs). Rebooted and everything was gone. Fantastic. However now they were unable to access secure web sites. So I did what I always do - Googled it. I found a lot of great solutions unforatunately for me none of them worked. I'm happy to say that after a few hours I did figure out what happened and I have the answer here!
I notice that in Internet Explorer I clicked on Help then About and saw the Cypher Strength was "0 Bit". This is bad and should 128 bit. This certainly explains why the secure web sites did not work. I've had this happen to me before and the fix is normally pretty easy. You just re-register a few DLL files. How? Just copy the below text.
regsvr32 Shdocvw.dll
regsvr32 Shell32.dll
regsvr32 Oleaut32.dll
regsvr32 Actxprxy.dll
regsvr32 Mshtml.dll
regsvr32 Urlmon.dll
regsvr32 softpub.dll
regsvr32 softpub.dll
regsvr32 wintrust.dll
regsvr32 initpki.dll
regsvr32 dssenh.dll
regsvr32 rsaenh.dll
regsvr32 gpkcsp.dll
regsvr32 sccbase.dll
regsvr32 slbcsp.dll
regsvr32 cryptdlg.dll
This is all the files (and some extra) that have anything to do with Internet Explorer and your encryption. Once you copied the above list just get to a command prompt window (click Start then Run then CMD then enter).
Once you have your command prompt window just right click and hit Paste. You will see series of windows coming up and hopefully your only response is OK and the box said successful. However in my case on two of the files I got an error. So what I had to do is copy two files (dssenh.dll and mshtml.dll) from my personal computer to the clients c:\windows\system32 directory. Then re-register the files as below.
regsvr32 dssenh.dll
regsvr32 mshtm.dll
That's it! Now Internet Explorer says 128 bit Encryption and the client is happy!
