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#21
Well, I have experimented with this, and may be able to help - but the OP's comment early on "I am not going to mess around with add-ons like context menu "open with" as that does not fix the bug in Win10 causing shortcut to open printer dialogue." suggests that it may not.
I dropped a URL shortcut onto my desktop from my browser address bar, and when I rt-click it and select properties, it shows (or rather, showed) me (under General) that it would open with Firefox (my browser):
Note that one can change the program to open with that button right there. I then tried a rt-click (which looked like this:
)
selected 'Open With' and the following option list appeared:
I selected Internet Browser - I did not select 'always...' - this had no apparent deleterious effect - FF still opened when I double-clicked the sc. I then tried again, this time selecting 'IB' and the 'always...' option - this didn't stop the sc from working - but it surely messed up my context menu: this no longer showed 'Open With', or any of the other 'personalised' items:
In addition, the properties 'general' tab no longer shows an option to change the program:
Nothing I subsequently did could fix this - under 'Settings>Deflt apps>choose by file type', the only option was the existing 'Internet Browser' one (no sign of FF there). I tried removing the complete .url entry from HKEY_Classes_root in the registry, in the hope that it might magically revert to some helpful default, but no joy - the sc still opened fine, but 'open with' was gone. I confirmed the behaviour for two other users (thus messing up their ability to ever change the default app to run), and finally had to resort to restoring this morning's Macrium Reflect image.
That done, I set about investigating further, and first confirmed that the behaviour was repeatable (as Einstein apparently did not remark: "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result"). I tried adding an 'Open with' entry in the registry under HKCR\.url, to no avail, then tried again under HKCR\InternetShortcut (which is where .url points), following advice I read here:
How to Fix the Missing “Open with” Option on the Windows 10 Right-Click Context Menu
Apparently I had only to read one of the posts above to find Ten Forums has its own guide here: Add or Remove Open with Context Menu to URL files in Windows 10
But it worked! My rt-click now offered an 'open with' option:
I was slightly surprised that its name did not match the quirky name I had given the menu item, but no mind: it worked. I could now select FF as the program to open, and my context menu for the sc was then back to normal.
Now you (or rather, the OP) might think 'so what, I want to get rid of my printer error', but I hope that getting back the 'open with' option will allow them to select another program other than 'Internet Browser', perhaps Notepad, for example, and thus purge the messed up 'thing' that links to the printer - then hopefully 'open with' can be set to the browser of choice (but not that tiresome generic 'IB' option). I do think MS has messed up here, as losing that 'open with' is a pain.
I hope the OP gets to try this out, if only to say that it fails to fix the error. hth, Martin