Did you ever have the problem that you wanted to change the file association of a certain file type but were not able to ? The normal way of right-clicking the filetype, clicking on Properties, then on the Change button next to the Opens With entry and browsing to the executable did not work for me because the executable was not added as the default software.
It also did not work to double-click the entry to use this way to change the file association for the file type. My problem occurred after moving an application to another drive. Loading the file from within that application worked fine which was good to know. I tried searching the Internet for an solution but was not able to find one.
I then decided to solve the problem on my own. Here is how I repaired the broken file association and added the right executable as the default software for this application. Everything that needs to be done can be done with the command line and two commands.
Open the Windows command line and type the follwing ‘Assoc .ext’ replacing .ext with the file extension in question. It should display something like ‘.ext=name’.
Remember that and type ‘ftype name=”path to executable”‘. You might need to write ‘assoc .ext=name’ again to finish the process.
This way the file extension will again be associated with the correct executable. Below is a screenshot of how I changed the broken file association using the command line.
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11 Responses to “How to fix broken file associations”
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Did you ever try WAssociate (http://www.xs4all.nl/~wstudios/Associate/)?
As for me – nice program.
Roman the software looks very nice but more complicated at first glance. Can it fix this problem or only fix associations that can also be changed using the default methods ?
It is file associations editor – you can change anything related to some file extention and changes will be stored in registry.
Besides, it’s not that complicated either…
Martin, nice. Very nice.
Thanks a lot for this advice. It solved my problem with broken association of OpenOffice files. However, I had to make a small modification: after following your instruction I was able to open the desired program by double-clicking on the file, but the file did not open in the program. So instead of using ‘ftype name=”path to executable”’ I used ‘ftype name=”path to executable” %1′ and the everything was OK. Once again, thanks a lot!
Thank you for this, it also solved my problems with OpenOffice. In addition to what MaSlo did, I had to write:
‘ftype name=”path to executable” “%1″′
to get all files to work.