Today randomly this functionality stopped working for my Plex client. I used to be able to double click the plex system tray icon, right click/left click “Open Plex…”, or open the updates pages from the system tray and they have all stopped working today.
Even when I open “About Plex Media Server” and click “License information” the hyperlink opens no webpage. So it seems like something broke to where plex can’t open links from Windows.
My default browser hasn’t changed and I re-applied it as the default app and to handle http/https protocols just in case. Maybe something got deleted/corrupted/is missing in the registry?
I also tried downloading the setup exe and repairing my installation and that did not work. Other system tray applications that have right click entries that open web pages in my browser all work correctly(tested with 3 different apps). Only Plex isn’t working now.
Please help and thank you in advance. I will respond to any responses and also if I find a solution.
Perhaps there’s some kind of (now unassociated) protocol used by plex to launch those links in the default web browser? For some reason I also found today that another app “Steam” was unassociated and couldn’t launch games until it was associated with “Internet Browser”, some kind of choice that just opens the .url links in whatever the default browser is at the time.
Maybe whatever registry entry plex used to open those links from the system tray got deleted somehow with some others of mine. I don’t know how to find what Plex uses for this.
If you have Antivirus or anti malware or other security features, they can get in the way. Let us know if you have any of those.
It’s safe to leave the registry alone for now, and instead do an uninstall of Plex Media Server using the standard Windows uninstaller. Do not use any 3rd party apps to uninstall PMS. When you use Windows like that it will leave your Plex metadata, media, and login setting untouched.
After you uninstall PMS, reboot the computer, download the latest version of PMS and install it again. Once it’s installed and started, give it 6min to initialize before you use the Plex web app to connect to it.
If you can get into your server okay with the web app, try the system tray menus.
I didn’t and don’t have antivirus or anti malware enabled during any of these processes.
I just tried following your steps exactly, but unfortunately it did not restore functionality to the system tray menu. Thank you for your help and any other suggestions would be much appreciated.
