The Admiral

Is there a computer expert in the house? I know that there is.
I have been to MS knowlege base and found reference to this problem but I can't understand what it says. I have posted the problem on 3 different Newsgroups without getting an answer. Here's the Problem.

My wife's computer is a P3 1.2 mhz 512 mgb of ram, 30 mgb HD with 25 mgb free space running W2000 with service pack 2 installed. MS Office. All that works fine.

She is an avid bridge player and I found the web site of her bridge unit for her, namely www.unit222.com. When I type that into the address bar it comes up fully functional. Subsequently she can access it via the drop down list of the addresses. However, to make it easier for her I put a shortcut on the desktop, but when I try to access the site via the short cut I get the following error message. "This file does not have a program associated with it for performing this action. Create an association in the folder options control panel."

I have seen this message before and have never been able to figure it out. I know where control panel is, I know where the folder options folder is but I still can't make it work.

I have three other computers similarly equipped and configuered and all three of them work fine given this same set of circumstances.

I will give a banana to anyone who will give me the solution. Please hurry, I am going mad.

The Admiral

Loren Pechtel

The culprit is that the extension isn't registered. Unfortunately, off the top of my head I can't recall how to register one. On XP I can select open with, specify a program and mark the checkbox to say to always do this. My only 2k equipped machine currently in pieces because I'm replacing the HD.

The Admiral

Loren

I think you are right about the problem being the extension, but why doesn't it transfer from the address to the shortcut and why only on the one machine?

It's no big deal, she can get to the site okay via the drop down list, it just bothers me. I want to know.

The Admiral

Cofffee

Internet shortcuts are kind of special. They aren't like launching a link to a folder or file you want to launch, but they also have a special flag that tells your web browser to open and then the specified address gets passed to your web browser so it loads it.

I'm not sure how you made your internet shortcut, but make sure you include http:// in front of the address or it will be looking for a file on your computer with the name (e.g. C:\www.unit222.com or whatever).

The best way to create a URL shortcut is to drag and drop the little "handle" that is located on the left of the URL bar in your browser where you type your web addresses (In IE it looks like an e on a piece of paper, in Netscape it looks like a tiny little bookmark). You can drag it to your bookmarks, your desktop, your quicklaunch menu or your start menu to create a shortcut to that web page.

If the shortcut created by dragging and dropping does not work, perhaps you need to reinstall/upgrade Internet Explorer to get this type of link to work again.

Generally, the place where you configure extensions is by going into Windows Explorer and choosing "Tools | Options" and going into the "File Types" tab.

But because internet shortcuts are special, I doubt if the above dialog will let you configure them. This is because the extension dialog tells Windows what to launch when you click a .TXT or .JPG, but your shortcut ends with a .COM... which is normally a type of EXE file that can be double-clicked to run. The Shell Handler instead detects the http at the beginning and launches the browser to load the page. Making changes to the shell handlers usually requires digging in the registry.

LeftCoast

Here's what you do.

First, create a new shortcut to Internet Explorer on the desktop - find IE in the programs menu and right-click on it, pull down to the "send-to" option and there should be an option to send to the Desktop as a shortcut.

Find the new shortcut on the desktop and rightclick on it and select "properties"

In the "Target" entry on the "Shortcut" top you should see the entry ending with ... \IEXPLORE.EXE"

In that edit field and after the closing " add the url of the web-site you want IE to open to as noted above be sure to include the "http://" in this case you want http://www.unit222.com - as long as there are no embedded spaces in the url, you should not need to enclose the URL in quotes.

99Percent

reinstall Internet Explorer.

The Admiral

99%

That's worth a try but how do I reinstall I.E. without reinstalling the whole O.S.?

The Admiral

The Admiral

Coffee and Leftcoast;

Thanks to both of you. I still haven't been able to make it work. That I.E. handle on the address bar is missing on that computer. I'm thinking that I.E. is actually not installed. I wonder if I lost it when I installed that latest Service Pack because I know it was there before that. I'll check that out.

The Admiral

Loren Pechtel

It does transfer the address to the shortcut. The problem is that it doesn't have instructions on how to run a .URL file.
As for why--somehow it got erased. I don't know why but it's Windows--what do you expect?!

Cofffee

You should be able to get the latest Internet Explorer version as well as other important patches by using Windows Update.

Or you can download the Internet Explorer Installer directly from the Internet Explorer page.


I don't even use IE all that much as I've grown attached to Mozilla. It eats up a lot of memory though. It does have popup blocking and e-mail spam filtering built-in which is nice.