Hyperlinks using the wrong application to view images (bmp & jpg)

Which is the default web browser on these two computers?

I had to look... Chrome - this is the machine that (incorrectly) uses MS Paint and FireFox for the machine that works ok.

See if Chrome lets you change which programs it uses for hyperlinked images. If it doesn't, consider changing browsers.

See if Chrome lets you change which programs it uses for hyperlinked images. If it doesn't, consider changing browsers.

I can't see any way for Chrome to set which program gets run. I can't see how you would do this with IE, Firefox nor Safari either.

I have tried setting each of the different browsers to be the default, and re-started my test Excel file with links and the result is the same.

I don't get why the browser would affect how Office programs choose which program to use.

As i thought further about this it occured to me that the Office Applications might be using OLE to invoke other applications and this might be why they are ignoring the normal windows settings. Along these lines i checked out the 'assoc' command line function and found that the bmp extension was associated with Paint;

assoc .bmp

.bmp=Paint.Picture

** This is despite the Control Panel tool saying that bmp is associated with Windows Photo Viewer!! **

so i set .bmp to be 'bmpfile';

assoc .bmp=bmpfile

and bingo bmp hyperlinks are opening with Windows Photo Viewer.

I next checked jpg files. These are now opening with Internet Explorer, despite being set (in Control Panel) to be Windows Photo Viewer). I also get;

Assoc .jpg

.jpg=jpegfile

Playing with this hasn't made any difference.

Am i on the right lines here? Any thoughts?

Ok. I think that i have found the answer.

For reference i was interested to see how jpegfile was defined, and this led me to realising the bmpfile (which was a guess from me) doen't exist, so i don't understand how this is working for bmp files.

Check out ftype command;

http://discussions.citrix.com/topic/285622-jpeg-file-association-issue/

The answer for jpg files is here;

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/officeversion_other-word/change-default-program-when-opening-hyperlinked/61e1c089-4184-482d-92cd-e7b33a768155

This fixes the problem for jpeg files, but leaves some questions;

(a) why does my bmp fix work?

(b) the jpg fix changes the relationship from 'html' (which presumably causes a browser to kick in to a Photo Viewer file. On the machine that worked all along the setting is still to the 'htm' clsid ({25336920-03F9-11cf-8FD0-00AA00686F13}), which suggests that there is some other intervention going on. Is it possible that Internet Explorer has something to do with this?