Capitalisation in Vista registry - Outlook, link browser

[mike nolan]

VISTA Business x86, Office 2003, Outlook

I have just come up against an issue relating to the capitalisation of a value within in the Vista registry.

The problem manifested itself within Outlook 2003 - if we tried to open a URL link from an Outlook item that wasn't proceeded by HTTP:// then the "locate link browser" dialog popped up. Opening www. links from within other office applications were fine.

After some investigation it would seem that changing the capitalisation of the "C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe" value in the following Vista registry key could make the issue appear and disappear. It looks like if you capitalise any one of the letters of the IEXPLORE.EXE bit of the key value then that changes Outlook's behaviour.

Reg key is :

Key Name: HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\http\shell\open\command

Class Name: <NO CLASS>

Last Write Time: 02/10/2008 - 07:24

Value 0

Name: <NO NAME>

Type: REG_SZ

Data: "C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe" -nohome

Changing the Data value to the one below sorted it out.

Data: "C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\IEXPLORE.EXE" -nohome

I suspect this is due to a configuration anomaly related to our environment (aren't they always), but has anyone else seen this or have a view on this?

Not a major problem for us now we know how to work around it. Originally the entire IEXPLORE.EXE was capitalised during our Vista install so it is probably another program being installed subsequently which has changed the value of iexplore.exe to lower case which then has caused the error.

(As always, please ensure you know what you are doing if you go into the registry to try this out. If you are not sure then please do not try this as changing values in the registry can be extremely unwise if you do not know what you are doing and could lead to prolonged periods of stressful conversations with computer techs.)

Thanks

Mike

Edited October 9, 2008 by mike nolan