Hi,
In Windows XP and Vista, when IE (or messenger) download a file an alternate data steam named "Zone.Identifer" is created to store information about the zone the file orginated from. This was how Windows knew which files should have that "This file came from another computer and might be blocked" with an "Unblock" button in the properites for such files. Of course, this only works if downloading to an NTFS volume.
Vista also added the /R option for DIR, which allows us to see the alternate data streams. I can easily confirm this behavior on my home PC, which is Vista.
But on my Windows 7 desktop at the office, there do not seem to be any alternate data streams on downloaded files. DIR /R shows no Zone.Identifier ADS for downloaded files, and "This file came from another computer and might be blocked" is not displayed in the downloaded file properties.
Nonetheless, downloaded files are preserving zone information. If I download an HTML file from our Intranet, and then open the downloaded file in IE, it shows as being in the Intranet zone. If I then copy that file to a FAT partition and back to my desktop, it then shows as being in the local Computer zone. So there is metadata that was removed by copying to/from FAT.
Any ideas what is happening here? How is the zone information being stored, if it is not in an ADS any more?