I’ve just finished paving my main machine with Windows 7 64 bit, and was working on tidying up some of the finer points of my installation.

One minor item I use is a batch file with a reference to the excellent Poweroff utility. The batch file basically powers down the monitor, locks the machine, then goes into standby/hibernate mode. I attach it to a Ctrl-f11 hotkey to make it a quick keystroke to powerdown my machine.

Anyway, I have that bat on my path, and I happen to keep it out on a network drive (a NAS array), not on my local machine. I generally keep data off my local machine, preferring to only have program installs and temp files locally.

But when I pointed my shortcut to the network path and hit Ctrl-F11, I’d get that annoying “The publisher could not be verified” prompt. Every time!

Well, a few googles later and I came across this tip on annoyances.com.

It’s for Vista, but it also works in Win 7 (even the 64bit version).

Run gpedit.msc 

Go to User Configuration >> Administrative Templates >> Windows Components >> Attachment 
Manager

Add "*.exe; *.bat" to the "Inclusion list for moderate risk file types" setting.

I added *.bat to the list, as well as *.exe because, in my case, I keep a number of handy BAT files in folders out on my network drives and then include those folders in my path.

Works a treat. Be sure to read up on why to include this in the Moderate risk element and not the High Risk, though. Generally, if you have a reasonably good firewall/router, making this change should be safe.