Disabling non-disableable Internet Explorer add ons

One day my laptop shut itself down while I was getting a cup of coffee. No big deal, I thought. I'll just plug it into charger and things will be ok again. It took me by surprise to see, that the battery was 80% charged and the laptop had done a "crash landing". Apparently it chose to turn itself off. I'm guessing to avoid an over-heating situation.

Couple of weeks later I realized that a machine that does not do anything, chews about 25% CPU constantly. The natural guess would be a virus scanner, but it turned out to be a process called IEWebSiteLogon.exe:

I've never heard of such an application. Google didn't reveal anything useful, but the process properties revealed that the file was located at C:\Program Files\Lenovo Fingerprint Reader\x86\, so the conclusion is that my fingerprint reader's software is running a piece of software to eat up a lot of CPU-resources to do exactly nothing.

The file name gave me a hint, that it has something to do with Internet Explorer. I was running IE 11:

I opened the add ons manager:

and there it was. My initial idea of disabling the stupid thing didn't pan out. The Disable-button is grayed out. Searching The Net revealed two interesting pieces of information: How to Remove Unneeded Plug-Ins in Internet Explorer By Andy Rathbone from Windows 8 For Dummies, which proved to be useless, it instructs to disable the add on. The second yielded results: Can't remove Internet Explorer Add-On. It described a way to track down the component by its class ID. Nice, but not nice enough. Somewhere there is a piece of code to attempt to load the missing component. Why not remove the requirement?

The details of the add on are:

Now I had the class ID of {8590886E-EC8C-43C1-A32C-E4C2B0B6395B}. According to SystemLookup.com is a valid piece of software, they say: "This entry is classified as legitimate". That class ID can be found in my Windows system's registry from the following locations:

• HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\
• HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Wow6432Node\CLSID\
• HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Wow6432Node\CLSID\
• HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Browser Helper Objects\
• HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Approved Extensions
• HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Ext\Settings\

The interesting ones are the system setting of Browser Helper Objects and user setting of Approved Extensions. Removing the helper object surely will disable the add on completely. Also it will be a good idea to make it a not-approved extension. And to un-register the component. All that should give the stupid add on a decisive blow and make it not waste my precious CPU-cycles.

The following PowerShell-commands run with administrator permissions will do the trick:

Remove-Item -path
  "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Browser Helper Objects\{8590886E-EC8C-43C1-A32C-E4C2B0B6395B}"
Remove-Item -path
  "HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Ext\Settings\{8590886E-EC8C-43C1-A32C-E4C2B0B6395B}"
Remove-ItemProperty -path
  "HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Approved Extensions" -name "{8590886E-EC8C-43C1-A32C-E4C2B0B6395B}"

If you don't have admin-permissions, the commands will fail. Also please note that every time Internet Explorer is started, it will make sure that permissions in the registry HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Approved Extensions are set so, that user is denied any modification access. See this:

I tried to remove the deny ACL with PowerShell, but it seems to be impossible. The API is not mature enough.

After removing the deny ACL and running the PowerShell-commands and finally stopping and starting the Internet Explorer, the add on was gone. I managed to "disable" it completely.