Walking in Light With Christ - hip0's personal blog on System Administration, Free Software, Computer Security and Religion

How to fix Windows Vista / Windows 7 can not open drive C with explorer error: "This file does not have a program associated with it for performing this action. Create an association in the Set Associations control panel."

One of my friends Windows 7 started returning errors while trying to open from My Computer the local Windows C, D and E drives.
This error appeared immediately, after malware and registry fix up programs were run on the PC. The exact programs that lead his PC into the state of returning an error:

This file does not have a program associated with it for performing this action. Create an association in the Set Associations control panel



are:

• a-squared
• Registry Booster

This two programs by the way are doing quite a good job on fixing Windows XP and Windows Vista PCs which were cleaned up earlier with Malware Bytes and Avira , however it seems they're not 100% still compatible with the Windows 7 registry database or some uncleaned malware or virus on the PC has post-messed up the registry file associations. As its always the case with Windows you don't have a clear idea what's going ...

Anyways as said the PC was in a bad situation, where neither Windows Explorer nor in any mean the disk drives can be cannot be opened / red and hence it was necessery for a quick way to revert back the default Windows file association registry settings After some quick research online, I've found an archive containing default Windows registry values for file associations

Therefore to revert back all Windows 7 file extensions from Windows install time, I had to download the file All_Default_File_Extensions.zip , extract the archive with WinZip or WinRar and run each of archive contained .reg extension files. The .reg files had to be run with Administrator account. It takes a while and its a bit irritating until all of the .reg files are run and all the file association default Windows settings are reverted back but thankfully in the end the C drive opening error:

This file does not have a program associated with it for performing this action ... is resolved. Cheers ;)