Open Internet Explorer In Excel VBA through direct program path

Question

I had an excel macro used to open an internet explorer application and manipulate the program. It worked perfectly for quite some time. However, some of my users have discovered that they need 64 bit internet explorer running in order to maintain some of their printing preferences (the macro automatically prints pages from our website). The macro could work if the internet explorer program was launched from the link C:\\Program Files\\Internet Explorer\\IExplore.exe.

My previous code to open the ie program was:

Set ie = CreateObject("InternetExplorer.Application")
ie.Visible = True
ie.navigate ("URL")

How can I make it so that my object ie specifically opens the internet explorer through the file path C:\\Program Files\\Internet Explorer\\IExplore.exe and creates it as the object just as it did previously? The internet explorer installed on our computers is ie9 if that matters.

Answer 1

The so-called Desktop version of IE (not the Metro version) runs a 64-bit IE frame with all IE windows being 32-bit. This is accomplished by Windows shipping default with both 64-bit (in Program Files) and 32-bit (in Program Files (x86)) versions of IE. Microsoft doesn't want people to run Desktop version of IE. Their most excellent reasoning is in the article by an Internet Explorer manager at Q&A: 64-Bit Internet Explorer . The 64-bit version of Internet Explorer 9 cannot be set up as the default browser either.

The following from your Q might suggest another way of attacking this: However, some of my users have discovered that they need 64 bit internet explorer running in order to maintain some of their printing preferences : Why is this so and does it have anything to do with the bit-ness of the printer drivers installed?