JVH Consulting's Blog

Any link clicked on from within Outlook email app would fail with following errors

Somehow the file associations with any browser are now broken.

Figured this might be something to do with Outlook’s Advanced setting that sets as shown below

If you use Chrome or Firefox as your default browser, be sure to change above setting to Default Browser vs Microsoft Edge.

In the case of above errors, though the user had Edge as default browser so that wasn’t the problem.

Next looked at all the default app associations, File type associations, Protocol and finally by application and made sure everything was set to MSEDGE. Still received the errors.

Searched all over the web for a possible solution and while there were many suggesting the repair windows commands: sfc /scannow and the DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth but these didn’t resolve it either.

Checked registry locations under HKCR\ – checked many file extensions and matched to another working system and all checked out.

Finally found this link to a potential resolution that resolved the issue!

Copied the registry file and imported onto broken computer. Without a restart was able to resolve the problem- Yah!

Below is dump of the registry file you can download from the site above.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[-HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\MSEdgeHTM]
[-HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\MSEdgeHTM]

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\MSEdgeHTM]
@="Microsoft Edge HTML Document"
"AppUserModelId"="MSEdge"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\MSEdgeHTM\Application]
"AppUserModelId"="MSEdge"
"ApplicationIcon"="C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Microsoft\\Edge\\Application\\msedge.exe,0"
"ApplicationName"="Microsoft Edge"
"ApplicationDescription"="Browse the web"
"ApplicationCompany"="Microsoft Corporation"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\MSEdgeHTM\DefaultIcon]
@="C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Microsoft\\Edge\\Application\\msedge.exe,0"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\MSEdgeHTM\shell\open\command]
@="\"C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Microsoft\\Edge\\Application\\msedge.exe\" --single-argument %1"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\MSEdgeHTM\shell\runas]
"ProgrammaticAccessOnly"=""

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\MSEdgeHTM\shell\runas\command]
@="\"C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Microsoft\\Edge\\Application\\msedge.exe\" --do-not-de-elevate --single-argument %1"

[-HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts\.htm\UserChoice]

[-HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts\.html\UserChoice]

Running above completely resolve the issue of clicking any links within email and have it open browser to the link.

Hope this helps! Till next time.