File associations can't be modified in UE/UES

[Cosworth]

When I try to modify the file associations under the Advanced Configuration tab, the Add and Delete buttons are not functional. I have uninstalled and reinstalled the program with no change. Any ideas?

[Bego]

Are you talking 'bout UE ?
Can you describe it a little more detailed ???

[Cosworth]

Referring to UEStudio. When you select File Associations under Advanced Configuration, the Add and Delete buttons are masked and cannot be selected.

[Mofi]

You can only delete an association which really exists and was created with this dialog. And you can only add an association if you have entered also a file description.

And you need of course also administrator privileges because file associations are created/deleted at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes in the registry. And all keys below HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE can be created, deleted or modified only with administrator privileges. And last you need write access permissions to the INI of UltraEdit or UEStudio.

[nsleigh]

Mofi

Thanks for your reply but this doesn't help. Even if I enter text in both fields the buttons are still disabled. I am a local administrator on the box so I have full access to the relavent keys. I have created some assosiations to UE via the initial file assosiation dialog that appears I just can't add any more.

I should point out that I have searched the forum and there aren't any answers to this problem. This thread is the only one on the same topic and until your answer it today it has been stagnent since February.

Neil

[Mofi]

Hello Neil!

The problem is that I can't reproduce the effect on my machines. There is no problem with the File Associations on Win98 and WinXP with UE v11.20a and v12.10+3 (both english). Maybe it is a bug of a specific version, although I can't read anything about such an issue in readme.txt.

Do you have installed a previous version of UE into a different directory as the current version?

The default installation directory has changed in the past. Don't know at which version, because I have never installed UE at the default location. See also last post from rpurban at program list?

Are you familiar with the registry and Regedit? Can you search the whole registry for uedit32 and UltraEdit and check the keys found for something invalid like wrong path or bad reference?

I have used Regmon from sysinternals while opening the Configuration - File Associations dialog. It looks like UE is scanning the whole HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT (= HKEY_LOCAL_MACINE\Software\Classes) section for file associations with UltraEdit. And I did not see a possible problem in the LOG from Regmon why UltraEdit could block any file association modification.

It would be interesting if Cosworth has found the reason why it has not worked on his computer.

If the existing registry entries are OK or you have not enough experience to check the keys in the registry, rename uedit32.* to something diferent like xedit32.* while no instance of UE is running. Then start UE and try the file associations now with the default settings. If this works, compare the default uedit32.ini with your xedit32.ini. Maybe you can see which setting is the problem. Delete uedit32.* and rename back your setting files xedit32.* to uedit32.*.

If nothing helps, write an email to IDM support and ask for help. The developers of UltraEdit should know when UE blocks the modification of the file associations. Please post the solution also here if you have found one. Good luck!

[jsdp]

I reported the bug to IDM in UEStudio a LONG time ago, but has not yet been solved. I experience the same problem with the latest release.

Regards,

Jose

[nsleigh]

If have tried reloading UE, creating a new ini file, monitoring with filemon and regmon and nothing is showing the problem. It does sound like real bug and it seems I am not alone. I guess I'll to create associations manually.

Neil

[Mofi]

There must be something on your machines which stops the file association feature of UE/UES to work.

I have another idea. Maybe on your machines you have too many CLASS entries for UltraEdit/UEStudio and this produces a buffer overflow inside UE/UES. Could you do following:

Start Regedit and export HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes to a REG file in Win9X/NT4 format (ASCII - smaller).

Open this REG file in UE and open the Find dialog.

Enter following UltraEdit style regular expression string: %^[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\[~\]+^]. Dont' forget to enable the option Regular Expression and press the button Count All.

How many items are found. I have 4372 on my WinXP machine and 1846 on my Win98 PC.

Or there is one special registry entry on your computers which results in a stop of work of the file associations configuration in UE.

I could test if your registry is the problem if you pack the REG file with the setting in HKCR with ZIP or RAR and upload it anywhere temporarily. Then I could import your settings temporarily into my registry and try the file associations dialog too. If it then fails also on my computer, we know that the registry or one registry entry is the problem and I could look further on it.
If you don't want to export your settings, I can offer to export my settings and you temporarily import it for testing. But I have Win98 where I can create easily a backup of my registry (copy system.dat and user.dat) and restore it in DOS mode. I would not do that with WinXP. It's to dangerous.

[nsleigh]

You may be on to something, I have 11404! I have posted my hkcr to ... deleted.

Neil

[Mofi]

Hello Neil!

I have downloaded and imported it into my Win98 registry. This has needed a few minutes because your HKCR is larger than my whole WinXP registry. But UltraEdit has had no problems on Win98 even with this big amount of registry entries. I could successfully delete YOUR existing file associations to UE with the UE configuration dialog and also add new file associations. The restart of Win98 with this registry failed, but I restored my registry in DOS mode.

So the number of registry entries is not the problem and most probably not a single entry.

I just detected in my WinXP registry 2 entries with characters displayed as rectangle. That were wrongly created entries and I have deleted it.
Neil, I detected also in your registry 3 non ASCII characters in a few entries. The first one has hex code 7F and I think they are correct. The other 2 non ASCII characters in your HKCR has hex code 06 and 01.

The 06 characters exist 5 times at [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Installer\Features\0DD23009EEBA4244CAE10B67DB4D3E05]

The characters with hex code 01 exist for example at
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Interface\{02D8C478-FAE6-4A8F-BF0B-F0BC3BBD4CE4}]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Interface\{0863A14A-EEA3-4AC4-A895-F010F43B4150}]
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Interface\{0AAD7B7B-A381-47FF-99D9-D83D3140F636}]
...

Open your reg file, switch to hex mode and search for 01 to find all these entries, if you want to fix it. However, these registry entries are not causing the File Association dialog of UE to stop working. UE/UES does not scan these entries.

Is on your PC an antivirus program or other special tools running which watches registry accesses and blocks suspect registry modifications. Several antivirus programs has such a feature.

Extra hint:
Neil, you have hopefully defragmented your big registry files. With Windows XP SP2 the registry files are automatically defragmented when you run Microsofts defragmentation tool on your system drive. (I think, but I'm not sure). For NT4, Win2K, WinXP and Server 2003 you can use the free PageDefrag tool from SysInternals. Especially at startup where the whole registry is loaded into RAM the (startup) speed will increase with a defragmented registry. One of my colleagues used PageDefrag to defrag his registry which was splitted into more than 4000 fragments. The boot time of Windows decreased by the measured time of 32 seconds (formula: harddisk seek time X fragments).

[nsleigh]

Here is the reply from IDM support:

Thanks for your response and the additional information. We have seen a very few reports such as yours and are working to determine how to resolve this. Basically what we've found is that although a user has admin privileges there are one or more file types registered on the system that the user doesn't have write access to. Because of this the Add/Delete functions aren't available in the File Associations dialog.
We do hope to find a way to resolve this in a future release.

Thanks, Troy

Troy A. Pennington
Operations and Support Manager
IDM Computer Solutions, Inc.

[Mofi]

Aha, very interesting. On your machine there are file associations where only the system (= Windows) has write permission. Would be very interesting which file association keys are controlled only by the system.

However, if you have Win2k or WinNT you can change with Regedt32.exe the permission settings of these entries. Regedt32 is a standard MS tool on WinNT systems not as known as Regedit.exe - see Differences between Regedit.exe and Regedt32.exe. I used it a few times to delete some registry entries of drivers which can be modified or deleted by default only by the system.

For Windows XP and Server 2003 Regedit.exe has all features to change the security permissions of a key. The problem is only to find those keys with wrong permission. I was never forced to do that and I'm sitting currently on my Win98 computer where such "problems" do not exist.

[nsleigh]

There are quite a lot of strange permissions on some of my keys (for some even admins can't delete them) but I can't work of which one is causing the problem.

Neil

[jsdp]

Neil,
have you used Registry Mechanic to "fix" your registry?

I did a fresh reinstall due to a disk failure and everything worked fine in UEStudio until I used Registry Mechanic. Now, strange things happen again with file associations.

Regards,

Jose