LOL - Whoops! File Association problem in W2K3

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Hee hee - I've landed myself in a pickle here. Just got asked by someone how to add a command prompt to the context menu of a folder and dug this out of my memory:

Go to Tools - Folder Options - Filetypes - then added cmd.exe under 'None - Folder' and it works fine.

Unfortunately, I stupidly didn't bother to check one of the machines I added this to and have royally screwed a user's machine by adding the context menu entry not to the 'Folder' but to the 'File Folder' entry. Now, whenever the poor sod double-clicks a folder to open it a Command Shell is spawned

Does anyone have any idea how to reverse it - changes made on this menu can't be altered from the GUI and there isn't an entry immediately obvious in the registry - if I wanted to manually remove the entry from the CORRECT location I would just navigate to HKLM\Software\Classes\Folder and remove it from there - I've just tested this and it works. Without there being a reg key that refers specifically to 'File Folder' in that hive I'm assuming I've altered something in the Shell, but can't figure out what it is.

I've run a RegMon trace on the machine whilst the user double clicked a folder but it hasn't given me much of a breadcrumb trail - there are thousands of entries pointing to cmd.exe, but none lead back to something that looks like a 'smoking gun' entry in the resgistry.

Has anyone else ever been daft enough to do this? I know - I know - it'll teach me to be more careful when dredging old bodges out of the depths of my mind - but if anyone else has done something like this in the past and can point me in the right direction for a quick fix thaty (hopefully) doesn't involve flattening the box and reinstalling it, I'd be eternally grateful!

Cheers

 

If you can tell me exactly what steps you performed, I can do it on one of my VMs. but ill need guidance on how to capture it with regmon, it seems to be spazzing when i run it.

 

Silly, I know, but is it XP? If it's local, will system restore do the job?

Just a shot!

Cheers,

J.

 

It is indeed.

Meyer's* defines it as:

*Legal note: Some (or all) portions of this statement may be entirely ficticious.