Sounds great, right? Unfortunately, the File Types window??”the tool found
in earlier versions of Windows that lets you edit context menus from within
Windows Explorer??”is completely absent in Windows Vista. In its place is
the extremely dumbed-down Set Associations window shown in
Figure 3-15. Here, you can only choose default applications for your various
file types, and in doing so, obliterate your applications??™ defaults or any custom
context menus you??™ve built (more on that later).
So, you??™re left with two options if you want to customize your context
menus: either hack the Registry or use a third-party program. Given that this
is the Registry chapter, let??™s have some fun digging through keys and values.
As described in ???Anatomy of a File Type,??? earlier in this chapter, there??™s a Registry
key named Shell inside the file type key where all the magic happens.
Each subkey of Shell corresponds to a single action in the file??™s context menu.
The text that appears in the context menu (the label) is defined in the action
key??™s (Default) value; if the (Default) value is empty, Windows Explorer just
uses the name of the key (e.g., Open). Unfortunately, Windows Vista has two
competing systems that determine the default actions for your file types; see the
upcoming sidebar, ???The Evils of UserChoice,??? for details.
132 | Chapter 3: The Registry
Say you right-click a Microsoft Excel document (.xlsx file), and at the top of
the menu that appears you see Open (in bold), New, and Print.
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