Jerry,
I thought I had better start this in a thread of it's own rather than continuing as an add-on in another thread.
I'm using FireFox v2 with XP Pro SP3 and PM 4.6 on both my laptop and desktop. Both have the problem of clicking on help, no errors, just busy for bit an then nothing.
The Forums work fine from within Photo Mechanic.
Help opens fine from Start\Programs\Photo Mechanic 4.6\Photo Mechanic Help or using the URL file:///C:/Program%20Files/Camera%20Bits/Photo%20Mechanic%204.6/Help/index.html
I believe this has existed at least version 4.5 of Photo Mechanic and perhaps earlier.
The test version I gave you launches the help with same URL (the file:/// one) and for some unknown reason fails to open. We don't have a single system at our disposal that exhibits the problem. I don't know how I can improve the code any better. It's pretty simple code:
::ShellExecute(NULL, _T("open"), filePath, NULL, NULL, SW_SHOWNORMAL);
Where filePath evaluates to "file:///C:/Program%20Files/Camera%20Bits/Photo%20Mechanic%204.6/Help/index.html"
The only thing I can think of that might be causing this problem is that FireFox is refusing to browse local content when run from something other than the OS itself. That would explain why you hear some activity and then it stops (FireFox is likely loading a new instance of the browser and then deciding not to load it and then quitting.) There is something called the Mark Of The Web (MOTW) that can be added to local HTML files to cause them to be loaded with the same restrictions as internet accessed content. All documentation that I have found indicates that this is an Internet Explorer feature, but I suppose that the FireFox/Mozilla team may have adopted it for their Windows versions of FireFox.
So if you could add the following line of text to your index.html file (located at the location specified by the URL above) and then give it a try, it may work:
<!-- saved from url=(0014)about:internet -->
You would add it so the first few lines would end up looking like this:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<!-- saved from url=(0014)about:internet -->
<html>
...
Let me know if that works.
-Kirk