W98se File Association with Winfile

I have had a lot of people asking lately about how to set a file association in Windows 98. This is especially a problem when software will "hijack" an association and not give it up, even after the software has been uninstalled. It has been my experience with Win98 that "open with..." and folder options are not always sucessful in setting a file association. Instead I use Winfile. I hope this is helpful to some of you. It seems as if very few people know of winfile, a little known and poorly promoted utility.

Davey of TSG states that: "Your Tip also works just fine in WinME!"

Brushmaster, also of TSG, states:

"I have been using that method ever since Win 3.1, and it works with all versions of Win 9x. I don't know whether winfile is included with NT or not, but if so, it should work. [Note: It does not exist in W2K - Jim]

"One caveat; winfile is a 16 bit program and can't handle long file names. If you do anything to a file in winfile, the long filename will be truncated. You can either select a file with a short filename (8.3) with the extension you want to associate, or you can rename the file afterwards in Windows explorer to get back the long file name.

"For anyone who is curious, winfile is simply file manager from Win 3x, carried over into Win 9x. Program manager (progman.exe) is still there, also."

Step 1

Go to Start >, click Run..., and enter winfile. Click Ok

Step 2

To select the file to be associated, navigate to it by first selecting the drive, then in the left pane select the folder(s) in which the file is stored. In the picture at the right you can see C: drive highlighted. The sample path is C:\mydocu~1\602doc~1\photoa~1\images\pictures. In the right pane the file pic_0~5.jpg is selected. For associating files any file of the desired type can be used. In this example we are going to associate .jpg files.

Step 3

Select the target file then go to the top of the window and click File > Associate...

Step 4

In the Associate window, confirm the file extension, eg. .jpg. In "associate with:" line, select the program you wish to open the file type by highlighting it in the list below, or by "browse...". In the given example you can see I have chosen Irfanview to which .jpg files will be associated.

Step 5

Once the file and program are selected, click Ok. Exit out of Winfile, then for caution's sake, reboot. You should now be able to double click the associated file type and have it open with the program you chose.

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