Why does Outlook launch IE in the background?

Anonymous
2017-05-09T14:01:44+00:00

Hello,

We are using Office 365 ProPlus on Windows 10 Pro.  Opening Outlook (16.0.7927.1020) will launch two background processes of IE (iexplore.exe).  Why does Outlook open IE?  

This behavior does not happen in earlier versions of Office 365 ProPlus, such as 16.0.6001.1041.  It appears that an update for Office 365 ProPlus is causing Outlook to open IE in the background.

Thank you,

Evan

Outlook | Windows | Classic Outlook for Windows | For home

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  1. Anonymous
    2018-10-09T19:26:42+00:00

    We're seeing that here as well (I reprod on 16.0.10815.20000). It doesn't appear to repro if protected mode is set to the defaults. Dev is investigating.

    We just checked in a fix to build 16.0.11005.37379, so any Insider Fast build higher than that should have the fix.

    Level setting: Outlook is expected to open IE when it starts. That is by design. The bugs are around IE not shutting down when Outlook shuts down.

    What we found in our investigation:

    Our original attempt to fix the bug here really did fix it - for a brand new machine. One side effect of the original bug was that it toggled the setting for osf-roaming.16 under HKCU\Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\ZoneMap\ProtocolDefaults from the original default of 3 (Internet Zone) to 4 (Restricted Zone). And on machines where this setting had been toggled from 3 to 4, our original fix was ineffective. The new fix takes all this in to account.

    So - if you're still seeing orphaned IE processes and want to try to fix it NOW, you can toggle the value for osf-roaming.16 under HKCU\Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\ZoneMap\ProtocolDefaults back to the default of 3. Otherwise, it looks like the next build of Insider Fast will likely have this fix in it.

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  2. Anonymous
    2018-10-09T19:50:30+00:00

    I never shut down Outlook.  So two instances of iexplore.exe are SUPPOSED to be running as long as outlook.exe is running?  No one has said WHY!  It sounds bogus to me.  There's no guarantee that Internet Explorer will even be among the "turned on" Windows features. 

    In fact, turning off the "Internet Explorer 11" feature certainly keeps Outlook from starting it.  That's just what I did.  Outlook doesn't seem to mind a bit.  And I doubt I'll miss IE.

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  3. Anonymous
    2018-10-09T19:58:58+00:00

    I did say why - I explained the whole thing on May 10th.

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  4. Anonymous
    2018-10-17T15:55:18+00:00

    We just checked in a fix to build 16.0.11005.37379, so any Insider Fast build higher than that should have the fix.

    I just checked on the integration status. Integration happened in build 16.0.11012.10000. So that's the build to really watch for.

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  5. Anonymous
    2018-10-17T17:34:10+00:00

    How do I check for and get updates.  On Windows 10, I don't have "check for updates" or "enable updates" in any of my Office 365 products.

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