How to force a file association in Windows 7? (Regedit?)

Question

I recently upgraded my Adobe CS4 Des. Standard to CS5. For some reason Adobe didn't overwrite CS4 but instead installed CS5 as a whole new series of programs. Seeing as I didn't want both CS4 & CS5 I un-installed CS4.

Problem was, it also destroyed all my file associations. So .ai, .psd, .indd etc... aren't associated with any program.

Theoretically this should be easy to fix. Right-click my_file.ai -> properties -> Change open with application -> navigate to Illustrator.exe in program files and click open. And that's supposed to do it.

Wrong, When I navigate to Illustrator and try and set it as default program, it simply does nothing. No error, but no association

So I'm stuck. Is there a way to do it in regedit? Or is there something I'm missing?

OS is Windows 7

Solution

I have good experience with Default Programs Editor - "powerful, multi-featured file association utility for Windows". Free and small, no install needed. I googled it while I was looking for some user-friendly way to change file icons :-)

Comments

[Emmanuel]

I'll give it a go. edit: Yes! it worked.

[stewsters]

This worked for me even when all the built in Explorer methods failed. Thanks!

[stewsters]

For reference, my problem was with having 3 versions of MS Project installed. Not even uninstalling the old ones would let me associate the files to Project 2010.

[DavidPostill]

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[ahmd1]

It's a shame that Microsoft can't make a simple UI like that, that is built into Windows. I'm on Win10 and somehow the .js extension got hijacked by one of Adobe products. So I needed to set it back to Windows Scripting Host. Doing it via Windows CP was giving me The program you have selected cannot be associated error. This little program did it in just a few clicks. Brilliant!