Insider Power Techniques for Microsoft® Windows® XP

Customizing Windows XP’s Open With List

As mentioned in the previous chapter and again earlier in this chapter, you can use Windows XP’s Open With feature to open a document in an application other than the one it’s normally associated with. This is a great feature that saves a lot of file-type twiddling, and you can make this capability even better by customizing the list of programs that Open With displays in either the submenu or the dialog box.

First, however, you need to know how Windows XP compiles the list of applications that Open With displays:

• Windows XP checks HKCR\.ext (where ext is the extension that defines the file type). If it finds an OpenWith subkey, the applications listed under that subkey are added to the Open With menu, and ...