Open With “Choose another app” Crashes Explorer

When the user right-clicks on a file, clicks “Open with”, and selects the option Choose another app in the Open with dialog or menu, nothing may happen. Or the Explorer shell crashes and restarts when accessing the Open With menu.

In addition, the View reliability history page in the Control Panel may show that the file openwith.exe (Pick an app) had crashed. Openwith.exe is the file that shows the Open with dialog in Windows 10/11.

Source             Pick an app
Summary             Stopped working
Description
Faulting Application Path:  C:\Windows\System32\OpenWith.exe

Problem signature
Problem Event Name:     APPCRASH
Application Name:       OpenWith.exe
Application Version:        10.0.10586.103
Application Timestamp:      56a84f02
Fault Module Name:      DUI70.dll
Fault Module Version:       10.0.10586.0
Fault Module Timestamp:     5632d29e
Exception Code:         c0000005
Exception Offset:       000000000003a706
OS Version:         10.0.10586.2.0.0.256.48
Locale ID:          1033
Additional Information 1:   b2f0
Additional Information 2:   b2f0c0a8de02d510420abe2d90a52171
Additional Information 3:   d978
Additional Information 4:   d978305aae990df3b2296bc76c66d2c1

On some systems, selecting the “Open with” menu may crash the shell (explorer.exe) process and the following event written to the Application Event Log:

The program explorer.exe version 10.0.14393.479 stopped interacting with Windows and was closed. To see if more information about the problem is available, check the problem history in the Security and Maintenance control panel.

Process ID: 2be8
Start Time: 01d28499b27b6de5
Termination Time: 0
Application Path: C:\Windows\explorer.exe
Report Id: a94d81af-f08d-11e6-ac9e-40167ee6f291
Faulting package full name:
Faulting package-relative application ID:

Resolution

Step 1: Inspect the “Applications” Registry key

The “Open with” dialog enumerates the application registration from the following registry keys:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Applications
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\RegisteredApplications

The latter key is specifically for registering programs with Default Apps or Default Programs.

Use OpenWithView from Nirsoft to narrow down the application registry entry that caused the crash, without using the Registry Editor.

The last four entries in the list had the Product Name and Company Name empty. Of the four, only one executable was present in the system, but there was no Product Name and Company Name information in the file’s properties. Disabling that particular entry (quickedit.exe) fixed the problem.

If that approach doesn’t work out in your case, use the same method for troubleshooting shell extensions using Nirsoft’s ShellExView, but this time using OpenWithView.

First, note down the entries that are showing up as disabled, so that you can reset them back to disabled after you finish the troubleshooting.

Turn off the first half of the entries not already disabled (sort by column “Disabled”) and see if Open with → Choose another app launches correctly. If that doesn’t help, enable the items you’ve disabled earlier, and disable the remaining half. If that works, narrow down the item in the second half to know which application causes the problem.

Once you narrow down the item, open Regedit.exe and go to this key:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Applications

Right-click the subkey name, which is the same as the executable name you disabled (e.g., quickedit.exe), and choose Delete.

Exit the Registry Editor.

That should take care of the problem.

RELATED: Fix Open with “Choose another app” Error Program Not Associated

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Step 2: Rebuild the Icon cache

A corrupted icon cache can cause the Explorer shell to crash when accessing the Open With dialog. The icon cache database files are located in the following folder, and they’re in use when Explorer.exe is running:

%LocalAppData%\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer

If the procedure in Step 1 doesn’t solve the issue, clear and rebuild the icon cache. To do so, check out the article How to Rebuild Icon Cache. The script option in that article is the preferred method.