If you download a zip file onto a NTFS partition Internet Explorer will store zone information in the file using something called alternate data streams. If the zone information is stored with the file it will be "blocked" within Windows. The file can easily be unblocked by clicking the "Unblock" button in the files properties (if your user account has the correct permissions).
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| File properties showing the unblock button |
We recently had a problem where we were downloading a zip file to a customer's machine, unzipping the archive and when we tried to run the executable that was in the archive it was failing. It seems that if you do not "unblock" the zip file then all of the files extracted from the archive will all be in the same blocked state. This was causing problems for our support team and it seems the answer to this problem is to simply unblock the zip before unpacking the archive (I suppose you could unblock each individual file after the extraction but we had a lot of files).
To see this behaviour download a file with IE and look at the properties. The alternate data stream is called Zone.Identifier, you can see the contents of the alternate data stream with the following command:
more < fullfilename:Zone.Identifier
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| Seeing the zone information saved with the alternate data stream on a downloaded file |
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