Suggested Sites - How To Turn Off Those Annoying Buttons That Keep Showing Up On The Favorites Bar On Internet Explorer

I kind of figured that my issue with Suggested Sites had something to do with the way I use XMarks to sync my Favorites/Bookmarks between IE8 and FF on my desktop and IE9 and FF on my laptop.  Whenever I would show my Favorites Bar on my browser (mainly for when I needed to use the TinyURL button to create a TinyURL from a long link), I would regularly see one or more or SIX "Suggested Sites" buttons on my Favorites/Bookmarks bar.  I would just r-click and delete each of them and then close my Favorites bar until the next time it was needed.

Well, I decided to do a little Googling recently to see if anyone else had this annoyance and what they were doing about it and I found this thread in the Microsoft Answers forums.

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/forum/ie9-windows_7/how-to-turn-off-suggested-sites-in-ie9-favorites/7ee314e3-5df4-4b52-82fb-bde0916b4ed6

Well, after reading through that thread, I had pretty much tried everything mentioned but it prompted me to dig deeper into this issue and here is what I found.  While these next tips haven't completely eliminated the Suggested Sites buttons from showing up, I only get one at a time and maybe only once a week now.

Here is what I added to the thread and what seems to be working for me 99% of the time...

One other thing to check....

Go to Manage Add-ons from the Tools menu. Then go to Search Providers. R-click on any that are enabled (usually Bing and/or Yahoo) and Disable the Enable Suggestions. I think it is these "Suggestions" that are being added as the Suggested Sites. I noticed all of the "Suggested Sites" on my Favorites bar would usually have the Bing logo or the Yahoo Exclamation point logo as part of the "Suggested Sites" addition. I just found this while digging into this problem and Disalbed them both and so far after a couple of hours, no new Suggested Sites have been added.

One other thing I should add is that IF you use Xmarks or some other syncing program to keep your Favorites synced between browsers and/or computers, like I do, you have to do the same on the other browsers/computers.

One last thing I saw that could be adding Suggested Sites was the MS sidebar gadget for News Feeds. I was still occasionally getting a Suggested Site button on my Favorites Bar even after turning everything above off and then I R-clicked on the MS News Feed sidebar gadget and saw it had six Suggested Sites buttons. I removed that gadget earlier today and so far, so good.

Let me know in the Comments section below if you have other ideas or tips that worked or might work.

Edit added March 26, 2012 - 1024PM - Go to Internet Options, Advanced Tab, scroll down to the Browsing section and UNcheck "Enable Suggested Sites" if it is still checked after all the above.  Click Apply and OK.
Lenny Vasbinder
http://LennyTheComputerGuy.blogspot.com


Some of the other relevant posts in that thread that I also checked and used...

Backup Windows Registry before making the change -
http://windowsxp.mvps.org/registry.htm

Hky_Current_User\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Suggested Sites
Right click on Enabled and change the default value to 0
Click Ok
Close Regedit
Reboot computer for change to take effect

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I would suggest you follow the steps below and see if it helps.
a) Open Internet Explorer.
b) Go to Tools.
c) Click Internet Options.
d) Go to Advanced tab.
e) In Settings scroll down to Enable Suggested Sites underBrowsing and uncheck the box.
f) Click Apply and OK.

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Right-Click on -> .../usernam/Favorites/Favorites Bar/ Suggested Sites.url
...then click on Properties
...then click on the "General" tab
...then under "Attributes" at the bottom click "Hidden"

It will be turned off an invisible. Not the same as getting rid of it exactly but it will be off and unseen, which is basically the same.

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