With Outlook Express, whenever you clicked on an email or web link, nothing would happen… sometimes the mouse pointer would briefly show the busy logo, but otherwise nothing.

I look on the net, and find all sort of suggestions.

The obvious ones involve correcting default file associations (but the email file association hadn’t been changed, and re-entering it made no difference.

Another suggestion was to re-register some critical dlls ie:

regsvr32 urlmon.dll
regsvr32 Shdocvw.dll
regsvr32 Msjava.dll
regsvr32 Actxprxy.dll
regsvr32 Oleaut32.dll
regsvr32 Browseui.dll
regsvr32 Mshtml.dll
regsvr32 Shell32.dll

But some of the commands give weird errors like:

• mshtml.dll was loaded, but the dll register server entry point was not found… The file cannot be registered
• shdocvw.dll failed. Return code was: 0x8002801c

I decided to install firefox, and see if I could use it as a workaround.

But after installing firefox, I just could not start it (I’d just get a busy hourglass for a few seconds, then nothing.

I finally found a solution that worked:

start control panel -> internet options ->advanced -> reset

Isn’t it amazing how 1 simple button, buried deep in a menu option, can fix a strange problem.