How do I edit the Open With list?

Q I have been running Microsoft Office Professional 2000 and recently replaced this with Microsoft Office Professional 2003. But I cannot open .doc or .xls files by double-clicking on them in the Documents folder. I can open either file from within Word or Excel, though. So I decided to follow some of your earlier advice to adjust the file associations.

Upon doing so the Recommended Programs section of the Open With dialogue box offered only Microsoft Office InfoPath, Notepad and Wordpad as options for .doc files and just Microsoft Office InfoPath for .xls files.

I used the Browse button and found the relevant excel.exe and winword.exe programs. However, when I chose Open this did not add the programs to the Recommended Programs section of the dialogue box.

How do I remove the erroneous file associations from the Open With dialogue box, and how do I get Excel and Word to appear on the Open With right-click menu? My PC runs Vista, incidentally.
Tony Randall

A Your second question is the easiest to answer, so we will start there. In fact, you were already halfway there. When you clicked Open, the relevant program (Word or Excel, in this case) would have appeared in the Other Programs list below Recommended Programs.

Ensuring the correct program is highlighted here (if not, click it), tick the box labelled ‘Always use this program to open this kind of file’ and click OK. The file association will be changed and the selected program will appear in the right-click Open With menu.

Removing entries from the Open With menu is trickier. If you are a novice we advise using a tool designed to help with this task, such as Open With View, a free download.

However, if you are more confident a quick Registry edit will get rid of these Open With intrusions. Making a mistake while editing the Registry could cause serious PC problems, so back up and proceed with caution.

Click Start followed by Run, type regedit into the Run box then click OK.

Now navigate to the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\OpenWithList key to find the list of current Open With entries.

To remove one, right-click it and choose Delete. This particular Registry edit applies only to Vista, so don’t try it in Windows XP or 7.