TechNote 10009: HTML Help files will not open across the network
After
installing recent Microsoft security patches you may find that HTML Help (.chm)
will not work across the network. You will know this is a problem when you load
your help file because the table of contents will display but on the right where
your topic should be it will say "action canceled" as shown in the
example below.

There
are a couple of ways to work around this problem.
Option
1 - Lower security
You
can use certain registry settings to tell HTML Help to ignore the security restrictions.
This is reasonably easy to do http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896358
contains details of the restrictions and what you can do.
There are basically two possibilities:
1. Allow all chms on your intranet to run
This is not particularly restrictive but if you are confident of the security
on your network this would work fine.
REGEDIT4
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\HTMLHelp\1.x\HHRestrictions]
"MaxAllowedZone"=dword:00000001
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\HTMLHelp\1.x\ItssRestrictions]
"MaxAllowedZone"=dword:00000001
Download this example as a .reg file.
2. Allow specific folders
In this case you restrict the ability to display chms to a specific folder.
This is quite restrictive but would work fine if you are only needing to run
chms from a specific place. In some cases such as the root folder of a drive
limiting it to a folder doesn't seem to work. In the example below you want to
allow access to any HTML Help files in the folder \\server\data
REGEDIT4
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\HTMLHelp]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\HTMLHelp\1.x\HHRestrictions]
"MaxAllowedZone"=dword:00000000
"UrlAllowList"="\\server\\data;"
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\HTMLHelp\1.x\ItssRestrictions]
"MaxAllowedZone"=dword:00000000
"UrlAllowList"="\\server\\data;file://\\server\\data"
Download this example as a .reg file.
Option
2 - Use BrowserHelp
This
option is just a change of target so rather than outputting to HTML Help you
output to BrowserHelp. BrowserHelp is a browser based help system so it will
work in any browser. It gives you most of the functionality you are used to in
HTML Help, such as table of contents, index and full text search.
Rather
than linking to a chm file you simply link to the home page of your project (such
as index.htm) and now your content will be able to be displayed across the network.
|