After disabling Vista Home Premium's Firewall & Defender and installing the AVG 7.5 commercial version, I started getting warning dialogs that the Consent UI for administrative applications is trying to contact an outside IP address.

I looked up the address and it's for VeriSign.

I have been denying the outgoing communication without any obvious effect on the system but does anybody know why a Vista component needs to talk to VeriSign? I don't want to permanently deny it until I know whether it's important or not. Hate to be snakebit later and discover it's necessary to run something.

First read this: http://www.heise-security.co.uk/news/86294

Next read this: http://www.heise-security.co.uk/news/86429

Verisign supplies the certificates. Your component may be trying to verify the certificate associated with it by contacting Verisign.

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Microsoft MVP Consumer Security 2006, 2007 & 2008

Thanks for posting the links but I'm not sure the WGA communication discussed on those pages is the same thing as what's happening on my computer.

On every reboot, the Consent UI tries to silently contact VeriSign. The articles cited above are about Microsoft's WGA and do not mention VeriSign. Yes, Microsoft could have contracted VeriSign, but if that's the case, I'm surprised the article didn't mention it and that Googling [verisign vista "consent ui"] turns up almost no information -- my original posting is at the top of Google's list of found links.

It seems nefarious that this communication is not clearly represented. If its necessary to prove I purchased all the software on my computer (I did), I don't mind. I just want to know why this is taking place. Since installing AVG I saw a few other similar communications that specifcally indicated that software on my computer was contacting home to make sure it was legit. I approved all those because I recognized the name of the software company in each case.

This attempted VeriSign contact, though, remains mysterious.

The same exact scenario is happening with me. It will request access twice on boot. So far I have been denying.