This may be ancient history now to some , but I'll make it available for public consumption here just in case others are unaware.

 

For the last couple of months, I've experienced an intermittment problem getting hyperlinks embedded in e-mails to work in Outlook. when I've clicked on the hyperlink I get an error message saying "General Failure", followed by the web address I was trying to access through the hyperlink, a file suffix and then  followed by "Class not registered "

 

I hadn't got a clue what this meant and Microsoft, being as helpful as usual, hadn't provided any information links on the back of the error message.

 

Looking on the web I found a lot of advice, some of it from official Microsoft advisers,  regarding resetting security settings on IE to default, resetting IE as default browser and removing third party browsers, none of which worked.

 

Eventually I came upon this :-

 

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office_2010-outlook/general-failure-class-not-registered/25823280-fb7a-4e68-96f8-dd0460a2478a?msgId=ac6369ed-3c89-497d-8a63-cd4735db20c8

 

The advice relating to the optional  IE update, in the last post of the thread,  has worked for me - Optional update KB2670838.

 

You might also want to check the operational status of Windows update. Mine appeared to have switched itself to manual and there were a number of regular updates waiting as well as this optional one.

 

 

Nick

Edited 23 August, 201312 yr by Clunkclick

Hi Nick, glad it's all working fine now.

 

Nothing more annoying than something that won't function correctly and you can't work out where the issue lies. 

Of course you COULD have used Thunderbird and not had the problem in the first place.

Oh ! Smack botties all round for my earlier decision to  source exclusively from MS on compatibility grounds.

 

 

Even TBird isn't without its problems:-

 

http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/932461

 

 

 

Nick

 

 

Strange, I have never experience that - or ANY other problem with TB; Outlook on the other hand, gave me no end of trouble, especially back-ups, which failed more than 50% of the time.

 

With TB I have working backup files going back over 6 years; every one of which has been tried and found to work perfectly.

You have a point, Outlook is still far from foolproof - since doing an update 18 months ago my copy on start-up still issues a false error message on completion of sync ! And I can't find afix fotit

 

But I'm heavily into One Note for Home use and Outlook works OK with that -at the moment !

 

Nick