From: mayayana@invalid.nospam   
      
   | >   It shouldn't. I've never allowed it and I'm not sure what   
   | > it may try to go out for.   
   |   
   | It's very likely that the one which initiate the network request, would be   
   a   
   | Shell Extension. Even more so if it's a third party one, which has its own   
   | built in auto-update feature.   
   |   
      
     Yes. That's what Explorer Bars, Drop Handlers, etc are.   
   They run in the Explorer process. So I would expect to see   
   Explorer trying to go online if a shell extension were making the   
   attempt. Though I've never checked that.   
      I thought I remembered Explorer trying to go out on my   
   system, in the past, but a check of my firewall settings shows   
   no setting for Explorer either way, indicating it's never attempted.   
      
   | > But Explorer is closely tied to IE, so it gets complicated.   
   |   
   | Not really. Explorer (i.e. explorer.exe) does not use any MSIE's embedded   
   | web browser component. Only third party shell extensions would do that.   
      
     There's no longer a browser window in folder windows, but   
   that's only one aspect. They're still deeply tied in XP. And as   
   you said, 3rd-party extensions change the picture.   
      
     I wrote my own Explorer Bar for folder windows and found that   
   it wasn't possible to not include IE. I just had to code it to   
   ignore IE. That is, the way it works is that your extension   
   gets notified of both IE and Explorer events. IE is also still   
   tied, nominally, into ShellFolderView. The browser window   
   is gone but the object model remains. And MS conflates IE   
   with networking functionality. So it's Explorer, but programmatically   
   it's often both. The naming is also confusing. I didn't want   
   to assume the OP knows the difference between iexplore   
   and explorer.   
      
     So can Explorer decide to go online of itself? I don't know   
   of a case where that would happen, but I wouldn't rule it out.   
   Personally I wouldn't allow either Explorer or IE to go online.   
   I love the power of IE and I love the Active Desktop tie-in,   
   but that rendered IE unsafe for online use.   
      
      There used to be debates about this in the VB group. People   
   were using functions like URLDownloadToFile and believed that   
   was not IE. But cookies will get saved in the Cookies folder!   
   Then people claimed those are "Windows" cookies, not IE   
   cookies. So even programmers didn't get the tie-in.   
      
     Until they finally came out with winhttp I was using straight   
   winsock to download files, in order to keep IE/Windows out   
   of it.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)