I installed Media Center 20 before the holidays.
During the holidays, I sent several Christmas holiday pictures to my family using Outlook 2010. My wife uses the Time Warner "webmail.rochester.rr.com" interface to get her mail and not Outtook. Instead of seeing the .jpg images, she saw a file of hex characters. After exploring various thoughts to remedy the situation, a light went on: The last time that strange behavior happened with Outlook 2010, I had installed Media Center 17. Microsoft engineering support found that MC17 had changed the Windows registry values for the .jpg as noted in my posts back then. Here is another email problem with images: I also just installed Media Center 20 too! Hmmmm....
For the Media Center 17 problem, it only took assigning program responsibility for jpgs and other image types to a different application than Media Center so that the registry values for those image types were factory Microsoft. For Media Center 20, I had no program/file assignments with Media Center, so this time I just deleted all of Media Center 20. Walla! - Problem gone. My wife and and my daughters, who use Gmail, didn't see hex characters anymore, they saw the actual images.
Given the history of Media Center 17 and MS Outlook's interaction with image file types and the registry, I strongly suspect that Media Center 20 is again changing the registry and Outlook couldn't understand those values properly. I don't have the time, as I did with a Microsoft Corp. engineer to spend days finding the problem with him remotely debugging my machine. Empirically, the precedent and removing Media Center 20 was enough to say, "enough" I can't upgrade without this being repaired. (If you look in the original thread, the earlier MC17/Outlook problem was effectively dismissed.) So this post goes out to anyone who might encounter a similar problem with Media Center 20 - Here's my experience!
Regards,
Hank