Removed IE and now Hyperlinks don't work

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I was reading an article today that stated there was a vulnerability found that, even though IE was not your default browser, access could be gained by clicking on a file of a particular file type associate with IE.  Since Microsoft has been encouraging people to not use IE I thought the sensible thing to do was to remove IE from my Windows 10 PC and some other articles I read said that in Windows 10 removing IE was easy.  After removing IE I now have a problem where clicking on any hyperlink in Outlook 2010 fails with the following message:

This operation has been cancelled due to restrictions in effect on this computer. Please contact your system administrator.

I searched the internet and the solutions said to change the HTM and HTML default classes in HKCU to be htmlfile in both default settings.  The only problem there is that the defaults are already set to htmlfile.  I thought it might be the default browser settings or the default browser settings for the file types were messed up but they were both indicated that my default browser is BRAVE.  I even tried to change my default browser to EDGE but that didn’t work either.  Short of reinstalling IE is there a fix or a registry hack or hacks that I can deploy to restore the ability to click on a hyperlink and launch my default browser whatever that browser might be?

Any help would be deeply appreciated.

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IE can’t be uninstalled, just disabled.
Many Windows functions rely on IE which is more than a browser.
‘re-install’ IE. Chang file association for HTM/MHTML to another app, like another browser or Notepad..

https://www.askwoody.com/2019/to-block-the-latest-zero-day-instead-of-removing-internet-explorer-just-short-circuit-access-to-mht-files/

1 user thanked author for this post.

woody

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Also posted at TenForums: Removed IE and now I cannot open hyperlinks in Outlook 2010

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Please note that the current IE concern is with .MHT/.MHTML files, not .HTM/.HTML files.

The fix from Try3 at post #3 in your TenForums thread will restore your Outlook hyperlink function.

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Thanks everyone for the feedback.  Apparently, there are older apps besides Outlook 2010 that rely on IE being present to function properly so the assumption I made that it was OK to remove IE was a faulty on.  After reinstalling IE the hyperlinks in Outlook became functional again so my next step was to change app association with .mht and .mhtml files but I took a slightly different approach than was previously suggested.  Instead of creating an empty file on my desktop and then changing the open with for that file type to Notepad or some other app, I instead opened IE and saved an actual web page as a .mht file.  Once saved, I changed the open with association for that file type to Brave.exe which is my default browser.  From what I read elsewhere Chromium-based browsers, can safely open .mht files so for those that do use .mht files this will still allow you to retain the use of your files without exposing your PC to the treat that’s been discovered.  Since Brave is Chromium-based I was able to open the page I had previously saved in IE and was able to navigate the page successfully.

1 user thanked author for this post.

OscarCP

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