The option to delete a file association is conspicuously absent from file associations user interface in Windows 7, so how can you delete file associations you no longer want? Read on as we explore how to remove a default file association.
Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites.
The Question
SuperUser reader Christothes writes:
While the tool for doing so definitely moved, certainly the option to remove a file association hasn’t vanished completely.
The Answer
SuperUser contributor Peter Mortensen offers the following solution:
It takes a little longer to root through the registry in search of the file association key than to use the old file association user interface, but it gets the job done.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts
Deleting the sub-key with the same name as the extension you want to un-associate will delete the default program association. You’ll have to kill and restart explorer.exe for this to take effect.
You may also need to remove the same sub key from HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT as well.
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