IconHandlers are most likely to be broken by misbehaving installers for
graphics applications, so if you don??™t want to have to repeat these steps, use
the solution in ???Lock Your File Types,??? later in this chapter.
File Type Associations | 131
The Registry
Customize Context Menus for Files
A context menu (sometimes called a shortcut menu) is the little menu that
appears when you use the right mouse button to click on a file, folder, application
title bar, or nearly any other object on the screen. Most of the time,
this menu includes a list of actions appropriate to the object on which
you??™ve clicked. In other words, the options available depend on the context.
The context menu for files, shown in Figure 3-14, is an assortment of standard
actions common to all files (e.g., Copy, Paste, Delete, Rename, and
Properties) plus one or more custom actions depending upon the type of file
selected. Each of the custom actions is linked to an application: if you rightclick
a .txt file and select Open, Windows launches Notepad (by default) and
instructs it to open the selected file. The default action??”the action that is carried
out when you double-click the file??”appears in bold text in the context
menu, and the rest of the actions are listed below. Among other things, this
means you can have more than one program associated with a single file type.
In the case of .html files, for example, you could add an Edit action to open
your favorite web page editor, a View with Firefox action, and a View with
Internet Explorer action??”all in addition to the default Open action.
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