Choice Guard
What is Choice Guard? This is one of the questions that pops up every here and there during discussions on browser features. A lot of people don’t know what it is, and to be honest, I didn’t even know it existed until today. A fellow Microsoftee puts it like this:
Choice Guard is a piece of code that is responsible for setting the users homepage and search default if they chose those options during setup. Typically this is a simple task of writing a value into a regkey. However, several of our competitors install a “service” that is always running on your machine that prevents the regkey from being changed even if that is what the user decided to do. So Choice Guard looks for the presence of those apps that might be preventing the user’s choice from being carried out and works around their block to set the search default. It only does this one time… if the user attempts to change it again (either manually or programmatically) they are free to do so.
/nods head and rubs chin in a thinking and understanding manner.
Apparently to set the Live Search Default and Homepage on the Firefox browser you need to install yourself as an add-on which is why Choice Guard in Firefox, Choice Guard becomes visible.
Update Oct 1st:
Official statement regarding this topic on the Windows Live Wire via LiveSide