Windows 7 downgrade to IE 8

So I needed to downgrade a clients computer back to Internet Explorer 8. He was running Windows 7 and Microsoft decided to make IE 9 an automatic update for windows even though IE 9 still has many bugs and incompatibilities with third party software. It took me a couple hours of research to figure out how to downgrade and make everything work correctly. Even if you uninstall it if your updates are set to automatic then Windows will download and reinstall IE 9, lame. So heres how I went about uninstalling, stopping the updates, and reverting back to IE8 on a Windows 7 machine.

First we uninstall IE9 to do this go to control panel >> Programs and Features now go to the link on the left that says show updates. find Internet Explorer 9 and click uninstall on the top. Go ahead and restart now.

Ok now in my case I uninstalled it but now was left without IE8 I had no browser available to me crap. so how come well seems the iexplorer.exe file wasnt even there. Ok so to fix it what did I do? Easy once you know what to do. Open your start menu in the search type "Windows features" without the quotes.
This brings up a windows in the list you will now see IE8 click the checkbox next to it to enable it. restart again

Ok all set up yes? NO Windows will download and re-install IE8 on your machine if it is Win 7 platform so how do we tell it not to do this? A registry hack. go to start in the search box type regedit CAUTION changing the registry could cause your machine to crash or become unusable please only do exactly as I tell you to furthermore I am not responsible for anything that happens if you use the info in this tutorial on any machine.

After regedit is open we Navigate to HKLM(HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE) >> Software >> Miscrosoft >> Internet Explorer >> Setup >> 9.0

Navigate thru the folders on the left if subpaths dont exist create them in your registry by clicking edit new key Make sure your path now matches the above

Now look for a string in the right hand side of the window that says "DoNotAllowIE90" If it not there just right click your mouse on the left hand side of the window and choose "new > string value" Set Name it "DoNotAllowIE90" double click on it to chage it's name and value change the value to one of the following

If you leave it blank it will update to IE9

If you change value to "0" without the quotes then it will update to IE9

If you make the value "1" without the quotes then it will NOT update to IE9 anymore. This will not expire if you EVER want to update to IE9 you will have to come in here and change the value to "0" or a blank value.

so now we change it to 1 so it wont update for now

Hope this helps someone out there whom doesnt want to deal with IE9 yet due to bugs or incompatibilities