Duncan:
   I suspect that you're right about the file association having been the
issue.  .html files were not associated with either browser.  However, I
fixed that by associating .html files with Firefox, but R still gave me the
same error!  If that was the problem, R didn't realize the association had
been changed.

I tried uninstalling R and reinstalling R, thinking maybe it takes a
snapshot of associations once (at install), and keeps its own internal table
(even though that didn't sound all that intuitive).  No luck; R still
persisted in being unable to open help files.

Then I rebooted my machine.  I'm still getting the same error.
Any other ideas?

Thanks,
Jon

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 5:57 PM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch@stats.uwo.ca> wrote:

> On 03/02/2010 5:14 PM, Jonathan wrote:
>
>> Rich:
>>    Both IE and Firefox are unable to find the link you supplied.  However,
>> that's only because I've restarted my R session since I pasted the error
>> output (and it appears that each time I restart R, the URL is slightly
>> different).  This time, I get:
>>
>> ?sum
>>>
>> starting httpd help server ... done
>> Error in shell.exec(url) :
>>  access to 'http://127.0.0.1:31836/library/base/html/sum.html' denied
>>  ---
>> If I paste the new URL into either browser, I can read the entry without
>> issue.  This is what I've been doing to read help entries, but it's
>> tedious
>> to copy and paste the URL into a browser every time I want to read the
>> entry
>> for a particular function..
>>
>> Happy to hear any other ideas!
>>
>>
> What happens if you paste that into the "Run" box on the start menu?  It
> looks to me as though the association between URLs and your browser is
> broken.
>
> Another likely problem is antivirus software.  If you can temporarily turn
> it off, see if that helps.
>
> Duncan Murdoch
>

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