Set Internet Explorer as the default browser from the command line

This command will set IE as the default browser:

shmgrate.exe OcinstallreinstallIE

This policy should stop people determining the default browser.

you can try this, it will work

start "" "C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe" http://server_ip/home_page

the error in your command was that start expects first quoted string to be the title of the application, which in this case you can leave empty.

for setting iexplorer.exe as system's default web browser, you can use assoc and ftype commands, which associate extensions with file types, and file types with executable files, like so:

assoc .html=htmlfile
ftype htmlfile="C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe" %1

%1 is the argument here - that is the URL or the file that you can send to the program as an input