Quote:

and this obviously is not needed if you use my example above that uses EXPLORER.



Uh-uh, it's not at obvious as that. The point of my post is that while using EXPLORER (should) launch a browser, it just might not be the one you were expecting.

Say you have an alternative browser (FireFox, Netscape, Opera) installed and configured to handle URLs, or you have a URL which is not recognised by EXPLORER.

If you specifically want to open the URL using IE (maybe the page uses an IE specific add-in), you cannot rely on the associations that EXPLORER will use to determine the application.