After playing around a lil I think I've figured it out.. [for me at least..]
The program that you're pointing to isn't registered correctly.
In regedit: Navigate to Computer\HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Applicationsand find your
.exe name.
Navigate under its name to shell>open>command. In theDefaultchange its location to the actual location of the executable, hitokayand then try and reassociate the file type as you normally would.
Let me know if that doesn't seem to work.
This didn't work me. The entry "command" was full of weird characters like it was corrupted and I set it to "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office12\EXCEL.EXE. Tried quotes, no quotes, etc...
I have Excel 2003 and Office 2007 because I have an Excel application built with 2003 that in 2007 simply doesn't work. Errors in macros, charts all messed up...
When I go to Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Default Programs\Set Associations, I browse to Excel 2003 file and click open, it just ignores it and goes to the recommend program that is Excel 2007. It seems that because the filename is the same it doesn't
let me change from 2007 to 2003.
This started happenning today after I installed Windows Security Essentials that during the installation process i told it not to install windows updates when updating WSE but it did it anyway. It installed a bunch updates for applicattions that I don't
even have like all Office 2003 applications other than Excel. I would just uninstall all the updates of today but with about 25 updates how will I know which one f*-up everything to prevent it from being installed in future updates?
Honestly, I've been working with windows since the first version and I can't remember a new version with so much stuff messed up and so many steps back from the previous version (in my case XP64 since fortunately I skipped Vista) like Windows 7. I've had
to find a replacement for windows search that is a complete disaster in usability and bugs, I had to find a tweaker for the taskbar to stop it from grouping windows by application, I had to figure out why I see files in a folder in an Open/Save Dialog that
I don't see in Windows Explorer (I disabled UAC once and for all when I found out that on top of being responsible for a few program installations crashes already it was responsible for this also).... It's been 6 months and I'm still upgrading from XP! A new
record.
I'm going to uninstall Excel 2007 now.