Outlook will not open hyperlinks

Worked on an interesting problem today. A user called me and she could not open any website by clicking on a link in her email. She is using Windows XP Service Pack3, Outlook 2007, and Internet Explorer 8.

When she clicked on a link from her email, Outlook gave this message:

"This operation has been cancelled due to restrictions in effect on this computer."

As it turned out this was not an Outlook problem at all. It was a problem with Internet Explorer. We first reset it to defaults but that didn't help. Then I noticed that if you saved a website address to the Desktop and tried to open it, Windows would ask you which program to open it with. In other words, there was no default web browser.

To fix it, I opened Firefox and let it be the default web browser. Then I opened Internet Explorer and when it asked, said it could now be the default web browser.

Then we could open links from Windows and Outlook normally.