Outlook suddenly giving "operation cancelled"

Hi y'all. I run plain-vanilla Windoze-7 on a new Dell desktop, at home. I use Outlook for mail (wife's suggestion) and it worked normally for a month. But recently when I click on a link in an email, program displays,
"This operation has been cancelled due to restrictions in effect on this computer. Please contact your system administrator."

This seems to be a genuine Windoze msg, not a virus.

Tried looking thru Outlook's Help but...nothing. Now I'm wondering if perhaps I inadvertently changed a setting on the OS itself, which is what I'm checking here.

Anybody ever seen the message noted above? Ideas on what it means and how to fix? Many thanks.

Thanks--that's the culprit all right. However, the auto-fix said "failed to correct" or similar. I'll run thru the manual fix and see if that does it.

As an aside, I use Firefox as my default browser, and I see the Microsoft fix is geared to making IE the default. That strikes me as a likely snafu.
But again, your brain saved me quite a few hours of search time, so many thanks!