MS Word mailto hyperlink headaches

Question

Ive got about 100 customer supplied PDFs made from MS Word using the plug-in with about 50 hyperlinks each, some http others mailto. When you roll-over the mailto links you get the finger cursor, not the arrow-w cursor. On some machines, clicking the mailto link will spawn an Internet Explorer window with an Action or Navigation Canceled message followed by two Outlook email message forms. If Internet Explorer is already open you simply get one Outlook email form and no extraneous browser windows. On other machines the mailto links work normally that is, one email form and no browser window regardless of Internet Explorer being open or not. Out of 4 machines I have here locally in the office, 3 initially exhibited the problem, one did not. Our client has tested 4 machines at their site, all four exhibit the problem. After an entire day of testing locally to find out why some machines work and other dont suddenly two of the machines that initially exhibited the problem joined the one that did not, for absolutely no reason, none of the settings have been changed.
We can fix the PDF documents so that they work with 100% consistency simply opening the document in Acrobat and selecting Create Links from URLs is enough to over-write all of the hyperlinks with Acrobat code. Once that has been done, rolling-over the mailto links produces the arrow-w cursor and clicking the link only spawns one email form, never a browser window, every machine. The only minor downside to this approach is that the links are now subject to Acrobats annoying security warning This document is about to connect to the internet (well, duh, an email link was just clicked). Youd think problem solved and we can just move on, but no, the boss is obsessed with figuring out why some machines work with MS Word encoded hyperlinks, others dont, and some switch without warning or cause.
Just FYI: this problem does not appear to be version specific for any of the applications involved. Ive tried just about every imaginable combination of: Word 2003, 2007, Outlook 2000, 2003, 2007, Acrobat Reader & Pro 7 & 8, IE 6 & 7 and heres something curious: four of the documents were created with QuarkXpress on the Mac, they behave just like the Word docs.

Answer 1

The original documents were customer supplied so Im not sure what options were engaged, however, we were able to reproduce the problem internally and discovered the following:
If the link option is turned off in the PDF Maker preference, Word encoded hyperlinks still pass through to the completed PDF. These links work as described above, finger cursor on rollover, browser launch + 2 email forms on click if IE is closed, 1 email form if IE is already open, Acrobat internet security warning bypassed.
If the link option is turned on all links are Acrobat encoded, arrow-w cursor on rollover, 1 email form on click, no sensitivity to IE status, Acrobat internet security warning displays.
Based on the above observations, it looks like the link option was off when these PDFs were created and all hyperlink activity is from the Word encoding, not Acrobat but I have a hard time explaining why the four documents created in Quark work just like the ones in word, as far as I know Quark does not automatically encode URLs.