Hi all,

First off let me give you the solution to a problem that cost me about 30 hours (yes, I am that tenacious):

The problem came after initially installing from the studio express 2008 download ISO file followed by the msdn document download. The index, contents and search results would show up but when clicking on a link document explorer would give a "Navigation to webpage canceled"/"Internet Explorer cannot download..."/you get the drift errors. Online help worked and displayed after clicking a search result. This install was over a year ago when I was going to do a proposal for a project and wanted to evaluate express before (potentially) buying a full visual studio if I won the contract. Didn't win the contract so the issue died out for me. Recently started writing a utility for some personal use with express and the problem was still there.


Digging through the forums and finding many questions on the topic, I tried:
• repairing through add/remove programs without success
• removing & re-installing without success
• downloading & installing the express SP1 ISO without success
• downloading & installing msdn express without success
• repairing through add/remove programs without success
• renaming nslist.hxl in "All Users\Application Data\Microsoft Help" with a step backwards: it removed the existing index & content list (fixed w/below)
• repairing document explorer without success
• using "internal help viewer" and "external help viewer" without success
• manually starting dexplorer.exe using various command lines without success
• deleting DE and installing document explorer from "Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Help 9\Microsoft Document Explorer 2008" without success
• etc. , etc. without success

Finally, on a whim I took the url from the topic window and stuck it into a blank firefox and got a message saying firefox didn't know the protocol. Continuing with that route, I opened an internet explorer and stuck the url into it and it worked! This allowed me to browse any of the from the given page but did not have the contents/index/help favorites bar nor the search window.

Therefore there is something different between the document explorer and internet explorer. Some more digging revealed that the topic window is an embedded internet explorer. Going deeper still, it turns out that the antivirus software was preventing non-IE/non-firefox software from accessing the "...\Local Settings\Temp\Temporary Internet Files\" cache.

Allowing dexplorer.exe to access this directory structure cleared up the non-displaying topic window problem.

Throughout all of the installs/removals & re-installs/repairs, I was running as administrator and virus protection was disabled to allow creation/deletion of registry variables and programs.

OS is XP-64 w/SP2 & latest updates, AV is virusscan enterprise 8.5.0i/patch 6/latest DATs.

The remaining problem is that the documents for other packages now don't work with dexplorer. Namely it says that the help collection is invalid.

hope this helps someone

Hi,

Thanks for sharing !

I'm changing the thread to general discussion since this thread is not a question.

Thanks,
Harry

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