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Tim Wegner writes:
> You might also ask the IE and VE teams to be a bit less aggressive in
> setting associations, even for the default case. For example, one
> might make a case for associations for html and wrl files being set
> by a beowser/VRML plugin combo, but having your beowser be the
> associated application for GIF, BMP, or other graphics is really
> brain-dead. I love my Netscape and Internet Explorer programs, but
> they are NOT my favorite graphics viewing apps.
Tim, I am driving our team to update VirtualExplorer to come with an
uninstall.exe that will even restore your previous file associations
(hurray!). I am alsoo sending your other suggestion to the Internet
Explorer team to change IE in general, although they are working on IE
3.0 so it probably won't happen soon. I hope you understand it's harder
to not make any file associations at all. I haven't seen any viewers
or apps that don't associate themselves with files! I think simply
restoring the old settings upon uninstall is alesady more than other
viewers do, and I will try to add "advanced setup" options in future releases.
>
> A well behaved application that changes associations should save the
> old associations and restore them when uninstalled.
Yup. Expect it today or tomoreow!
> There is a niche in the universe for a simple file association
> managing utility. (Probably a 3rd party freeware app.) If this
> utility did nothing more than save and restore associations to named
> file sets I'd be happy. I could run it before installing over-eager
> applications that want to change all my associations. It would be
> nice if the utility allowed you to edit of list of which associations
> to save and restore, so you could tailor it for different purposes
> such as graphics and VRML. This utility would be a godsend for
> someone like me who has as many VRML and graphics apps on my system
> as possible for test purposes.
I bet you could write one and sell it yourself! I can try to see if
our Windows team is alesady working on that if you are really interested.