OT: Windows problem - Address not valid

[Tim]

Forgive my asking here but I've tried proper Windows techy groups with no success and I know that there are some seriously clued up people around this group.

I run Windows XP which is nice and stable on my machine but about 25% of the time, if I click on a link in an email or newsgroup message, instead of opening the link in my default browser (Firefox), IE opens up with an "Address not valid" header and "res://ieframe.dll/syntax.htm#" in the address bar.

I've been completely unable to work out why it does it sometimes and not others. It doesn't seem to make any difference if Firefox is open already or not. The links concerned are plain text links in Outlook Express.

Tempting to uninstall IE but a) I'm not sure if that is possible and b) there are some sites that I visit that just don't work right in other browsers.

I've been down the road of re-registering dlls (whatever that is) but it's never made any difference.

Any suggestions?

Tim

[Adrian]

"Tim" gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying:

Is there any pattern to the links? Are they all http:// ? I'm wondering if a particular protocol has IE down as the preferred handler, whilst FF is down for most.

If you're not on FF3.6, it'd be as good an excuse to upgrade as any - the reinstall may fix any links, especially if you then go through the usual list and make sure that all your plugins are fully installed in FF as well as IE.

Not surprised. The source app just doesn't appear to be passing them to the right app to handle.

That's your first problem, right there... Repulsive back of s**te.

I don't think it'll help - for the same reasons.

I'm presuming everything's fully WindowsUpdated, you've got adequate up- to-date protection on the machine, and - preferably - not logged in as an administrator?

[Jules]

Are you certain? (i.e. do you mean you've checked message headers to see what character encoding they're using, rather than it just appearing as though it's plain text)?

Quite why it'd try to use a completely different browser for the problem ones, I don't know - but then we are talking Microsoft products; maybe for certain types of data it completely ignores the registered default browser and is hard-coded to use IE...

... Or perhaps the opening of IE that you're seeing is the default Outhouse behaviour for "urk! I don't know how to handle this" - and *that* bit is hard-coded to IE; maybe it's in theory supposed to pootle off to microsoft and find a handler to download, and that bit's snafu for some reason.

cheers

Jules

[Bernard Peek]

I believe that the res:// at the start indicates that IE doesn't know which protocol to use. Does the URL that you clicked on specify HTTP?

[Tim]

Yep

Not that I can spot. I've just been trying a lot of links and hit one that failed. Went to try it again and it worked the second time (in Firefox). Very weird.

Updates have never helped in the past. This has been going on for months. That said, I'll give it a whirl.

All updated.

Tim

[Tim]

Yes, I've checked those. The coding method doesn't seem to make any difference.

It doesn't explain the random nature of it though. I might move over to Thunderbird but OE has served me well for years.

Tim

[Tim]

Yep. What I don't understand though is why IE is getting its knickers in a twist in the first place for. It's not the default browser!

Tim

[Adrian]

"Tim" gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying:

TBH, I'd just take it as a hint, and give Outpuke Excuse the long overdue heave-ho.

[zymurgy]

You can set IE back to defaults failrly easy (google it up). I've had to do it occasionally after some helper apps (plugins, whatever) borked up

Paul.

[frag]

Tim took a blunt brush and painted...

I have noticed that if you have FF set to auto update (itself and plugins), when it finds an update it will show the "found new updates" screen, when you start it using the FF shortcut.

If it's started by another program and finds an update, the other program (in the case of Gravity) will report that it failed to launch the browser.

Try turning off auto updates completely and see of that fixes it.

[Jen D]

I had a similar problem using quotefix with OE.

I solved my problem by:

OE, tools, options, security, download images, *untick* "Block images and other external content in HTML email", apply. Then restart OE

hth

[Tim]

Cheers Jen, you may have hit on the problem. I'm using Quotefix too.

Tim

[Pip]

Not quoting anything, apparently.

Most others dump that POS OE and use a tool built for the job.

[Tim]

Cheers Jen, that seems to have sorted it. I can stop tearing my hair out and shouting at my computer now! ;-)

Tim