IE occasionally loses the homepage setting and it goes to "about blank". I found a fix on a forum that explained how to edit the start page key in the registry. This has worked OK for me a couple of times but since 8.1 upgrade the registry will not accept any changes. Tried following the permissions change as in http://www.eightforums.com/general-...u-make-changes-thge-registry-windows-8-a.html but still not accepting the new value. May be a coincidence with the upgrade but it's worked before. Have done a system scan to check for malware etc and nothing showing (Bitdefender). Any ideas?
It sounds like you may need to take ownership of the Main key in the registry first, set permissions second, then you should be able to modify the Start Page string value.