I had an interesting and obscure problem today with a solution that was buried deep in the registry. Which is what this blog is all about! IE8 on Windows XP would go to www.google.com, but it would not go to google.com. I just got a message instead.

Microsoft Internet Explorer Cannot find ‘google.com’. Make sure the path or internet address is correct.

It was happening with other sites too; it would go to them if I included www, but would not go to them without. I knew there had to be some setting or registry entry that was screwed up, but I didn’t know where to look.

Finally I found the solution on the Maxthon support forums. It was a registry entry indeed. Under this registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\URL\

There are two subkeys, DefaultPrefix and Prefixes. In each of these is a (Default) value that should be set to http://. On the computer that was not working today, one of them was (value not set). I changed it, and it started working right away.

This entry was posted on June 28, 2012 at 1:30 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Posted in Errors Windows Windows XP by Scott Schrantz No Comments Yet