Clicking on mailto link in OL2007 hangs OL & other processes

[H Gohel]

WinXP Home, Office Professional 2007

When I click on a mailto: link in an email, an email window does not
open. Instead Outlook hangs and I can't really do much else on the PC.
The CPU gets pegged and iexplore.exe is the culprit. If I kill
iexplore.exe, then lots of lots of Internet Explorer windows start
popping up on the screen. Nothing I can do to stop it except to start
task manager and log off.

Poking around MS's web site, if found this one link that seemed proming:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/312346/en-us

However, I can't find the URL:MailTo entry in the File Types tab.
Second smaller issue is that the path to Outlook.exe is incorrect in the
KB article.

Anyway, I searched for URL:mailto in the registry and in places where I
found it for Outlook the entry matches what the KB article indicates
(except the path to OL2007), so that seems OK.

In Windows File Explorer I can right-click and send-to mail recipient
and it does open a mail window, so that's working.

Mailto: from any application - IE, Firefox, Thunderbird, etc. will not
work. I've run repair on Office 2007 with no change. Any suggestions
what to try next?

 

[H Gohel]

I looked at the MS KB article a bit more closely and I found the "File
Types" entry that they mention for URL:MailTo. It was already correct,
and pointing to Outlook.exe from the Office12 directory. I switched
from Outlook to OE and back to Outlook again as they suggested and in
each case, mailto links still hang my system.

Seems like it's a known issue, just that the suggested solution isn't
working out for me. Anybody have any other suggestions? I'm about to
fire up processmon to see what's happening.

 

[H Gohel]

Still no luck resolving this issue. However, I found that another user
on this machine does *not* have this problem with mailto links, so it's
something in my user settings only.

Is there a way to reset my Outlook settings?