I have been a loyal user of Netscape-descended products since about
1995. I went through the whole old Netscape family from 1 to 4.x, then
moved to Mozilla Application Suite when it went 1.0 and eventually to
Seamonkey, also when it went 1.0 -- and now I moved to Seamonkey 2. (By
the way, I think I should point out that I never had any significant
problems with any of them -- the opposite in fact, since the few
problems I had were *easily* solved, while similar problems with IE or
Outlook Express in my customers' machines turned out to be major
headaches.)
However, for a number of reasons, for a long time I kept Internet
Exploder as the official default browser in my Windows setup -- mainly
because it used to load faster when I clicked on a local HTML file, and
also because a few IE-dependent applications had problems if you changed
default browser. I almost never used IE for actual Internet browsing,
much less OE or even Outlook for e-mail.
Then IE7 (and later IE8) came, and Microsoft finally took steps to
separate the browser from the operating system -- a small step in the
right direction from a security standpoint. But the end result is that
IE now loads quite slower, negating the advantage of leaving it as the
default HTML file viewer. Also, with the rise of Firefox, other
applications learned how to deal with a computer where IE is not the
default browser. So, with a song in my heart, I thought I was finally
able to set Seamonkey as the default browser.
Or so I thought. Turns out that there is a Microsoft piece of crap that
insists on ruining it: the so-called Office HTML Icon Handler
(MSOHEV.DLL). It is installed (no choice about it) with Office 2003, and
modifies the standard way Explorer handles HTML files: if it finds a
line in the HTML header indicating that an Office application generated
that file, it does two things:
1. If you right-click the file and choose Edit, it will open the file
on the so-called appropriate application (usually Word, but sometimes
Excel or PowerPoint) instead of on the default HTML editor (Notetab, a
plaintext editor, in my case).
2. It will change the icon and filetype description in Explorer to
indicate the file special status as an office HTML file.
Having a different icon is (sometimes) convenient, because it makes it
plain that that file will need hand-tweaking (Word-generated HTML is so
full of crap that after I finish with it, the file has usually shrunk by
two-thirds or more). But it makes browsing a directory with lots of HTML
files very slow, since the handler will have to open each file to check.
But I could live with the lowered performance, so I let it be.
Until, that is, when it *broke*. Now all my HTML files display the
unknown file type icon (although they are listed correctly as
Seamonkey Document).
I tried all sorts of remedies. I tried unregistering the DLL, as
detailed here:
http://richardrudek.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!8B65F3DE0BE797AA!219.entry
I tried deleting the Iconhandler subkey on the Seamonkey HTML Registry
key.
I tried setting the default browser back to IE and then to Seamonkey again.
I tried uninstalling and reinstalling Office.
I tried manually choosing the correct icon.
All solutions I found were transitory at best. As soon as I use Word it
will restore the defaults and crap all over my setup again.
Has anybody managed to tame this beast?
--
MCBastos
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... More things change, the more you need alterations
* TagZilla 0.0661 * http://tagzilla.mozdev.org on Seamonkey 2.0
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