Today I ran into a problem that I hadn’t seen before. A customer’s MSN and Internet Explorer browser (including MSN email and web mail) would only print the HTML coding of a web page or email.
HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language and is the programming that is used to present web pages to us and the coding behind text color, bold, etc. in email. We had cleaned some spyware from this users computer earlier in the day, and even printed out some pictures, but a few hours later I received a call about this strange symptom. At first, I thought it was just a forwarded email gone awry, but after arriving on the scene and seeing that word processing documents, test pages, pictures, and spreadsheets all printed fine, the culprit was definitely in Internet Explorer 7.
Deleting temp files, using the IE 7 reset settings button, and changing printers didn’t work. After a few minutes of searching the web for an answer, I came across this jewel of a solution that worked!
- Close any open programs
- Click Start –> Run
- Type: regsvr32 /i mshtml.dll
- Press Enter on your keyboard
- Click Start –> Run Type: regsvr32 /i shdocvw.dll
- Press Enter on your keyboard
That did it! If your Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, MSN, or AOL browser prints only HTML coding, which usually starts with the following text, use the above six steps to restore sanity to your Internet and email printing.
DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>
<html xmlns=“http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” lang=“en” xml:lang=“en”
Related articles:
- Open Multiple Home Pages with Mozilla Firefox OR Internet Explorer 7 – Video Tip
- Reset Internet Explorer 7 or 8
- Print only what you want
- Solution for computer users who can’t print from Internet Explorer 7 (IE 7)
- Internet Explorer Quick Navigation Tip
Tags: browser, email, Internet, Internet Explorer, open program, Outlook Express, pictures, restore, spyware, Word, word processing
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THANKS Rick, so glad I found this post. One day everything was fine, and the next day everything from the web was printing in HTML. I tried your 6-step fix, and was told “Windows cannot find ‘regsvr32. . .
I had also previously tried resetting internet options, but that didn’t work. So I saw your recomedation for firefox instead of internet explorer – I downloaded it and now I can print again! Thanks.
Thanks for coming buy, and you will enjoy Firefox!
This resolution has screwed up my system now. I can no longer do a System Restore, use IE, Help, etc. w/o getting serious errors. This is not because of spyware or anything else, it’s because I’m running a version of mshtml.dll which doesn’t jive, I’m sure. I can not unregister/reregister a different mshtml.dll (it won’t allow it) and I now need help with that. Unbenounced to me, prior to applying your “fix” my nephew had updated the system to SP3. I believe the combination of this and your fix has created quite a mess. I may try to go ahead and reapply SP3 since the dll I used was probably one from SP2. Suggestions?
I’ll bet you might also be running IE8…this tip was for IE7. Look for IE8 in the Add/Remove programs and try again.
nope, running IE7 v2006
nope, running IE7 v20061107.210142, however, maybe I should go ahead and install IE8….that may fix the problem. I didn’t realize how many OS functions used this .dll, but there are several, including Help, System Restore, Remote Assistance, etc. etc. and I can’t use them now. What I don’t get is why I can’t register the .dll again (using another version). I’ve even tried this in safe mode. Well, I’ll take other suggestions if you got ‘em, otherwise, I may need to uninstall SP3 (which is not a simple uninstall), and/or reapply SP3, or backup system and rebuild – obviously last resort.
Okay, I attempted a repair of IE7. Everything looked like it was going to be fixed, but then a web page kept displaying asking me if I still wanted Google search engine to be the default. I said yes and the fix was shown to have Failed.
Then, I reinstalled IE7. Again the web page displayed asking about the search engine. I answered the same way, got the same results. I changed my answer to no and now the fix displayed as Successful.
So apparently, IE doesn’t want Google to be the default search engine either…… Someone else must have installed Google Desktop/Search engine as default somewhere along the way on this machine and apparently this was also a factor. Go figure.
Anyway, System Restore now works, hmtl now prints from IE, problem appears to be resolved.
Checked out your six-step solution with the following failure on the mshtml.dll loading (step 3).
“Mshtml.dll was loaded, but the DllRegister Server entry point was not found. This file can not be realigned.”
Any suggestions?
It sounds like you might have bigger issues at stake…like maybe spyware or some corrupt Windows files. You will need to have a technician look at that system for you.
Same issue with my cousins computer. IE7 only html printout in one users account. The other account works fine on same computer. I tried the fix solution and received same error. Baffled.
Other seen options include double checking to make sure IE7 is default browser and another one under this link:
http://support.microsft.com/?kbid=175322
Since downoading ie7 everything I printed from the internet…mail, web pages, etc was printed in HTML. I’m no computer guru so, since I had just downloaded explorer 7 and tech support was free, I called Microsoft. The tech support solved my problem in about 30 minutes. The solution was to reset internet options to the default settings.
I tried to see your video but like all other vides it is not accessible to me. Oh sure it eventually starts but then it stops and I get absolutely nothing. Probably due to dial up internet…
Internet explorer and Firefox work great but the AOL Browser shows only html on the pages! It always tries to debug but never does. I have tried everything but nothing works. Any ideas?
I’m serious…AOL software is early 1990’s technology and has no business being used this far into the 21st century.
You might have to do the uninstall on SP3, but you might be right on trying the IE8 upgrade first. Have you also tried the reset Internet Explorer option in the Advanced tab of IE options?
Talk about craziness. Way to be persistent…just another reason why I never use IE.