SOLVED: General Failure in sending the command to the application

Monday, April 11th, 2011 at 11:58 pm | 12,235 views | trackback url
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outlook 2010 logoThis problem results from clicking on a URL, mailto or web link embedded inside an email in Outlook when you have Mozilla Firefox set as your default browser:

Outlook general failure dialog box

If you’ve suffered from this problem using Outlook and Firefox on Windows, I have a fix!

  1. Launch regedit.exe (if you’re on Windows 7, right-click and “Run as Administrator”).
  2. Go down to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\FirefoxURL\shell\open\ddeexec..

    HKCR Firefox URL
    FirefoxURL shell open ddeexec

    On the right, you’ll see the following values:

    FirefoxURL ddeexec commas junk

  3. Double-click the “Default” key, the one with all the commas and numbers, and delete (i.e. remove) the value, leaving it empty.

Now if you go back and click a URL inside Outlook, it will cleanly load Firefox without any errors. Why this key gets corrupted, I don’t know… but this fix cleans it up.

Problem solved!

Last Modified: Sunday, March 6th, 2016 @ 06:05

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