The publisher could not be verified. Are you sure you want to run this software?

Recently, my copy of Windows XP started giving me this error, when I tried to run an executable program, even after I'd checked its source, firefox had virus scanned it while downloading, and I'd tested it with my installed virus scanner:

"The publisher could not be verified. Are you sure you want to run this software?"

Although I could disable this message for one program, there wasn't an obvious way to delete the feature. I went down a horrible rathole of trying to get the group policy console working on my XP home. Five megabytes of downloads and error messages later, I discovered that there's a registry entry that you can set, which prevents this nanny message. Here it is:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Associations]
"LowRiskFileTypes"=".exe"

You can either add this manually, or save that text as a text file, change its name to "something.reg" and double click it to add it to your registry. It may not take effect until you restart your computer.