I just rebuilt my computer at home. I like to do this every once in a while, to clear out the cruft that accumulates in the operating system. this time, I rebuilt with Win2K, and reinstalled all the tools that my wife likes: mozilla, real player, blah blah blah... and MS Office 2000.
everything seemed fine, until she went to look at the pictures of our munchkins, and found that they wouldn't display as thumbnails.
at first, I thought that it was because I use
Irfanview, since only the Irfanview icon showed. but, a short websearch later turned up this little gem from Windows Network Magazine:
Ensure Graphics Files Display Previews and Thumbnails Correctly .
it turns out that when I installed Office 2K, I also installed Photo Editor, then later uninstalled it so that it didn't accidently get used instead of Irfanview. when I did that, I wrecked the thumbnail associations.
it was a (relatively) simple fix, that only required that I add the
ShellEx key back to the file extension, which associates MS Paint with them. I went through the registry editor to add it again, but here are the registry files that I created in case someone else needs to do it.
Reassociate .gif files with paint for thumbnails:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.gif\ShellEx]
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.gif\ShellEx\{BB2E617C-0920-11d1-9A0B-00C04FC2D6C1}]
@="{7376D660-C583-11d0-A3A5-00C04FD706EC}"
Reassociate .jpg files with paint for thumbnails:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.jpg\ShellEx]
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.jpg\ShellEx\{BB2E617C-0920-11d1-9A0B-00C04FC2D6C1}]
@="{7376D660-C583-11d0-A3A5-00C04FD706EC}"
this worked like a charm. I guess that the value of the key actually needs to be
{7376D660-C583-11d0-A3A5-00C04FD706EC} or else it won't work... I'm guessing that this is a hex representation of MS Paint, or something like that.
as well, this didn't replace the file associations with Irfanview, so they still opened up properly.