There are lots of good things on the Internet and some that are not so good. I don’t want to infringe on someone else’s free speech but I also don’t think that means I have to read or see everything that is put on the Internet. Also I have children and I believe that there is a lot of content that is not appropriate for them. As such I have used filtering software for a long time. Earlier this year I upgraded to 64-bit operating systems on some of my machines and the software I had been using wouldn’t run so I asked around for other suggestions on what software others use to filter content. I settled on using Windows Live Family Safety (mainly because it is free and runs on 64-bit Vista). It has been working fine for me and my family until last week.

For some strange reason I started getting error 80210079 when trying to approve web sites for myself or for all users. I went through the normal dance of trying to search for information, repair the installation, and remove and install the Windows Live Essentials software. All to no avail. I couldn’t find anything on support.microsoft.com or by using several search engines. I decided to blog about it just in case someone else is getting the same error.

I have my personal settings set as strict at my youngest child just so I am not a hypocrite and asking them to go through something that I am not willing to do also. I also have other Live IDs so I changed the logged in user for the family safety filter and the error went away. I dug a little deeper and figured out that because I was essentially white listing all of the web sites I visit I had 500 approved sites on my primary Live ID and fewer (around 70) on the one that wasn’t giving me error 80210079. I tried deleting a few sites from my primary account and it stopped giving me the error when I approved new sites. I deleted a lot of sites that I don’t regularly visit.

It appears that Windows Live Family Safety has a limit of 500 sites in the approved list. This isn’t a problem for my children since they seem to go to the same sites (less than 100) most of the time but I will have to remember this when I get back up to the magic 500 number.