Question

I was opening up an .exe from a download manager and it asked the standard Open With question. I chose Internet Explorer by accident, and from that time onwards, i cannot open up any .exe files as it opens Internet Explorer.

Answer

When you use the Open With dialog to associate .exe files with another application, the settings are stored in the following registry key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Explorer \ FileExts \ .exe \ UserChoice

There will be a value named Progid in the right pane. The Progid data will contain the application's exe file name (Applications\Notepad.exe, Applications\IExplore.exe, or a Programatic Identifier such as txtfile, jpegfile etc).

Note that despite this problem, you should be able to launch applications by double-clicking on the data files. For example, with the above setting, you should be able to launch Microsoft Word application by double-clicking on a .doc file, but not by running Winword.exe directly.)

Registry fix

To fix the problem, you need to delete the UserChoice key above using a REG file or a script. Download exefix_cu.reg attached at the end of this article, and save it to Desktop. Right-click on the REG file and choose Merge.

For other file types

To undo the Open With setting for other file types, the registry location is the same. (Replace the text .exe in the above registry key with the actual file extension).

Example:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Explorer \ FileExts \ .xyz \ UserChoice

Where .xyz is the file extension for which you want to undo the Open With action.