I have faced this error “The operation system cannot run %1” after two different upgrades from Windows 8.1 Enterprise to Windows 10 Enterprise. This error was popping up in any Office application when clicking on a hyperlink. This was noticeable first in Outlook, Skype for Business and Excel as that is where I had the most hyperlinks.
I opened a Microsoft Case in August after the first upgrade causing this issue. I gave into Microsoft Support asking me to recreate my profile as we determined that this error didn’t show up after creating a new local profile. These steps were beneficial so I am posting them as well. But for this exact issue….Read on as there is a better option.
- Reboot the computer to release any locks on the profile.
- Log on with an administrative account.
- Navigate to the C:\Users\ folder
- Rename the user profile with the word “.old” at the end of it. Example: “username” becomes “username.old”
- Delete these two registry keys for that user: Open regedit.exe and navigate to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList In the “Profile Image Path” value. Find the key that lists the user name. Note the last four digits of the value. Then delete it. Then navigate to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\Current Version\ProfileGuid Find and delete the key with the four digits from the last step.
- Reboot the computer again.
- Login with the users credentials. 8. Transfer data from the user’s old profile (username-old), into the user new profile (username) one folder at a time.
This past week I updated my last Windows 8.1 Production development machine to Windows 10. This error came back, and I wasn’t going to allow the answer for recreating the profile. I went ahead and reopened a Microsoft Case to try to get to the bottom of the issue, but was able to resolve it from digging into SysInternals Process Monitor. If you do not know this tool, I would strongly recommend it as it is life saver troubleshooting tool to learn what your software is really doing behind the scenes.
I knew that it had to be failing loading iexplorer somewhere along the lines of opening hyper-links. I started to see several mentions to this path: “C:\ProgramData\App-V\9BD02EED-6C11-4FF0-8A3E-0B4733EE86A1\6A0357B5-AB99-4856-8A59-CF2C38579E78\Root\VFS\System\ieframe.dll”
This path did not exist. Grabbing the App-V container to search on this I finally came across a tell tale article that echoed my issue.
https://connect.microsoft.com/IE/feedback/details/1655339/the-operation-system-cannot-run-1
This connect article never showed up in my previous tedious searching the internet for the exact message of “The operation system cannot run %1”.
The article said to replace all the exact same App-V paths I saw in Process Monitor to the “C:\windows\system32\ieframe.dll” in the registry.
As always I would recommend backing up your registry prior to making any changes. But once this is changed without a reboot Windows 10 started working with my hyper-links as expected.
Learn SysInternals Tools, they are life savers!
Link to Process Monitor
