I definitely support the intent of the patent system. However, the issue (and perhaps this is due to "first to invent") is that large companies with the financial and legal resources to work the system have started claiming overly broad patents and then using this legal toehold to stifle / subdue competition.

If you as a small shop develop a multimedia streaming device that beats the pants off of anything Apple offers, but Apple owns the patent on "streaming multimedia over a network" your invention is essentially useless to you. Apple can step in and demand a cut of your profits so big that it puts you out of business, or just seek to put you out of business directly.

(BTW, not really picking on Apple here. Insert Microsoft or Oracle or even GE above if it makes you feel better.)

Now imagine you are an inventor who wants to avoid this scenario. What is your due diligence? An exhaustive patent search of any patent that might potentially cover the technology you're thinking of inventing? Better be a rich guy to start with. And once your search is done, you may find that any device you create (or part of any device you create) could conceivably be described by one or more existing patents. So you give up and switch to gardening, which stifles innovation - the exact opposite of the system's original intent.

The real crazy maker is that so many of these patents are not just over-broad but ACTUALLY PRIOR ART. They are patents for things that already existed well before the patent was filed. But the patent office grants the patent anyway, because they simply can't keep up with what's already in existence, and aren't really incentivized to do so anyway.

What's really needed is a more stringent definition of what's patentable. The Patent office used to require inventors include prototypes of their inventions along with their filing, until they ran out of room to keep everything. But now inventions are software or CAD designs, which take up only server storage space, which is more or less limitless. Maybe they should go back to the old system and require an actual, physical implementation of the invention in order to be eligible for the patent.

Hi Mouser!

I definitely didn't go spelunking into the registry until after I'd tried the more "conventional" fix of using Set Program Access & Defaults to reset the default browser.

If that by itself had fixed things, I probably wouldn't have posted here.

Even after editing all the registry entries, web links from within Outlook still weren't working. I had to go into IE and choose Internet Options, then on the Security tab click "Reset all zones to default level." That finally fixed the last BrowserChooser issue - at least as far as I can tell.