"VanguardLH" wrote

| However, probably better to know what causes Edge to load. HTAs (HTML
| Applications) relied on using IE's libraries. Since IE is deprecated,
| does the OS not direct such calls to the Edge libraries? If the OP
| manages to prevent Edge from loading, he might be killing the usability
| of some other program.
|

I don't know any reason that associating with
HTAs would cause Edge to run in the background.
It doesn't do that to IE. But my understanding is
that the main reason for IE to still be around is to
accommodate uses like HTAs and Web Browser
ActiveX controls. All of that functionality has been
stripped from Edge in order to make it safer. That's
why you can set compat mode for a domain and make
IE11 show it like IE, but you can't do that with Edge.
The functionality simply isn't there.

I haven't experimented, but I'm guessing that
Edge also doesn't accommodate automation and
shell integration. With IE it's possible to hook into
any running instance programmatically (including
HTAs) and access the "document" object. That
could be an interesting experiement to see what all
those Edge instances are up to, but it's likely that
the method won't work with Edge.

For anyone who's interested, I have a component he

https://www.jsware.net/jsware/compfiles.php5#jsshl

The ActiveX EXE version is designed to work with
Windows 64-bit. It's not something that beginners
can use but there are docs explaining the methods,
which should be clear to anyone familiar with webpage
document objects.
jsShell is a component for accessing shell and
Active Accessibility. It has a method
GetIEDocFromHandle that returns the document object
of any window of class Internet Explorer_Server, which
means anything that contains an IE browser window.
(IE, an HTA, a pre-XP folder window, a browser window
in 3rd party software, etc)
The browser part itself is an Internet Explorer_Server
class window.
jsShell also has methods to enumerate open windows, get
their handles and class names, titles, enumerate child
windows, etc.

If the Edge browser window is not Internet
Explorer_Server it could still offer an accessible
document object, but there's a good chance it doesn't.
If it *could* be accessed that would provide a
way to know the URL loaded and the content of
whatever is in the browser window.

Of course, what do you do after you find out
that 4 Edge instances are calling home and running
scripts from microsoft.com? If you can't stop them,
anyway, then it's an academic exercise.... as is any
attempt to civilize Win10, it seems. But if Paul has
no plans today then maybe we'll get the skinny on
this.