I think I've duplicated the problem, so perhaps I can clarify. Dirtbike, please tell me if I've got this right.
I have a WinXP Pro system with a local IIS server running. My web root is "D:\Inetpub\
I created an HTML file containing the following:
Code:
<html>
<head>
<title>Test</title>
</head>
<body>
<p><a href="file:///d:/Inetpub/[URL unfurl="true"]wwwroot/test.txt">Test[/URL] file</a></p>
</body>
</html>
The referenced test.txt file is just a plain text file with some random keyboard-banging in it.
If I go to D:\Inetpub\
and double-click on test.html to open it in Firefox, clicking on the link shows me the contents of test.txt. If I open it by starting Firefox and entering
in the address bar, I see the same test.html page, but if I click on the link, nothing happens. The same is true if I duplicate the procedure with IE6.
I have absolutely no idea why this happens. Perhaps it's a web browser security measure? All I can say is that you probably shouldn't be putting file:// URIs in non-local web pages. Just copy the file somplace under the web root and serve it with an http:// URI. If it changes regularly, set up a nightly cron job or scheduled task to copy the new version into the web root.