Windows Explorer has its own file associations, independent of HKCR.
A client needed to replace Foxit Reader with Acrobat Reader on their Citrix servers because some third party software required the Adobe rendering engine. After removing Foxit and installing Acrobat Reader, users couldn't open any .pdf documents from Explorer or Outlook.
First thought was the file type association. FTYPE and ASSOC showed the correct associations,but I reset them anyway:
ftype AcroExch.Document="C:\Program Files\Adobe\Reader 9.0\Reader\AcroRd32.exe" "%1"
assoc .pdf=AcroExch.Document
to no avail.
Then I lucked out and realized that on one of the servers, I'd failed to remove Foxit, had installed Acrobat Reader alongside. Users on that server were still able to open .pdf files and they were getting Foxit.
A quick registry search for "Foxit" returned several values, including one under the "Progid" value beneath HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Currentversion\Explorer\FileExts\.pdf
I don't know why Explorer needs a different file association, but deleting it solved the problem and after logoff and logon, users were blissfully (and silently) opening .pdfs with Acrobat Reader.
To delete the key for each user, I added this line to %SystemRoot%\system32\usrlogn1.cmd (it may wrap in this post, but it's all one line):
reg delete "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Currentversion\Explorer\FileExts\.pdf" /f
The line could also be added to a domain logon script.
(I initially changed the file type in the registry to point to Acrobat Reader, but then decided to try deleting it altogether. I prefer the deletion, since it appears to force Explorer to lookup the HKCR association. If you need the Explorer FileExt entry, this works:
reg add "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Currentversion\Explorer\FileExts\.pdf" /v Progid /t REG_SZ /d AcroExch.Document /f
)
A client needed to replace Foxit Reader with Acrobat Reader on their Citrix servers because some third party software required the Adobe rendering engine. After removing Foxit and installing Acrobat Reader, users couldn't open any .pdf documents from Explorer or Outlook.
First thought was the file type association. FTYPE and ASSOC showed the correct associations,but I reset them anyway:
ftype AcroExch.Document="C:\Program Files\Adobe\Reader 9.0\Reader\AcroRd32.exe" "%1"
assoc .pdf=AcroExch.Document
to no avail.
Then I lucked out and realized that on one of the servers, I'd failed to remove Foxit, had installed Acrobat Reader alongside. Users on that server were still able to open .pdf files and they were getting Foxit.
A quick registry search for "Foxit" returned several values, including one under the "Progid" value beneath HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Currentversion\Explorer\FileExts\.pdf
I don't know why Explorer needs a different file association, but deleting it solved the problem and after logoff and logon, users were blissfully (and silently) opening .pdfs with Acrobat Reader.
To delete the key for each user, I added this line to %SystemRoot%\system32\usrlogn1.cmd (it may wrap in this post, but it's all one line):
reg delete "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Currentversion\Explorer\FileExts\.pdf" /f
The line could also be added to a domain logon script.
(I initially changed the file type in the registry to point to Acrobat Reader, but then decided to try deleting it altogether. I prefer the deletion, since it appears to force Explorer to lookup the HKCR association. If you need the Explorer FileExt entry, this works:
reg add "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Currentversion\Explorer\FileExts\.pdf" /v Progid /t REG_SZ /d AcroExch.Document /f
)
Bob. Thank you. We had this exact issue, and I couldn't understand why explorer seemed to be ignoring the ftype and assoc values. Glad to see I'm not going mad.
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