I recently updated both of my Parents’ systems to Windows 7 – and last night I was asked to “Get rid of the security on my Mom’s Outlook”…?…My first thought was UAC. But then- what the heck was she doing that was popping up UAC?? So upon further investigation, the issue was quite different. In Outlook, anytime a web link was clicked the following error showed:
This operation has been canceled due to restrictions in effect on this computer. Please contact your system administrator.
Clearly this was not a UAC issue…but was it really even a security issue at all?? I checked the registry to see what was supposed to open the web links – first in the machine hive:
HKLM > Software > Classes > .html
This key looked fine. Then I checked in her local profile:
HKCU > Software > Classes > .html
Bingo! I remembered that she had installed Google Chrome via a drive-by-download when I had first got that system setup. She did not have any need or want for another browser, so it was uninstalled…looks like it left something behind:
The links in Outlook were failing because the system was trying to open them using ‘ChromeHTML’…which did not exist. Changing the default value back to htmlfile for .html, .htm, and .shtml resolved this issue.