Quote:
Originally Posted by yathribjr
Thanks BR, this works like a charm!
These sorts of mysteries make Windows challenging for non-experts like me.
I hope the Calibre folks can look into whether there is something that can be done about this quirk if I'm not the only one experiencing it.
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The Windows file association mechanisms have been a rats nest ever since... and IMO the more they try to 'fix' it the worse it gets.
I had all sorts of problems when the change to register calibre.exe as a candidate handler for all 'ebook' extensions was implemented in version 2.20.
I have files with 'ebook' extensions, which are not ebooks, that have no default handler - a conscious decision on my part. So, when the calibre 2.20 install nominated calibre.exe as a
candidate handler for these extensions Windows promptly made it the
default handler Ψ²
Because I was already using Send To to add books I had no interest in having calibre.exe as a candidate handler for anything, let alone the default handler. So I used the
calibre-debug --default-programs unregister option to
remove calibre.exe from Windows Default Programs list, and I set CALIBRE_NO_DEFAULT_PROGRAMS to 1 to
prevent calibre from automatically registering the filetypes it is capable of handling with Windows.
Now, if I should ever need to, I can add calibre.exe to the Open With list for a specific file extension manually - to date I've not had the need. But I just tested doing it again (Win10 Pro version 1611 64bit) and it works as expected.
The first issue is that the file extensions are totally ad-hoc. FX, Pegasus, Quicken and Visual Studio all make use of the PDB extension, but they are likely to barf on PDB files they didn't create. The second issue, IMO, is that software shouldn't add itself to Windows Default Programs without asking the user. And the third issue is what Windows does when there is no default handler for an extension and something announces - 'I can handle that'.
BR