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A French version of the documentation of version 2.5 by Alain Lenoir and André Vaysse is available for reading or download.
WAssociate is FreeWare written for Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 200 and XP. It is intended to manage the associations between file name extensions and the file types stored in the Windows registry. These stored file types determine the appearance and actions supported for a file by the Windows shell Explorer.
WAssociate is a shortcut for the file type settings found in the options dialogs of Explorer, or taking the same walk using registry editors like RegEdit and RegEdit32. With WAssociate you have an additional way to edit these associations specifying icon, description and available actions for a file.
WAssociate is about being in control when double or right clicking an icon, in Explorer or any Windows Common File dialog. Quickly editing context menus, associated commands and changing icons and descriptions. Control freaks have easy access to the Windows registry key HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT, and more...
To use WAssociate effectively, you need to have, or develop, a basic understanding of how Windows assigns properties to file name extensions through file types and classes. To get you started a short introduction will be given in these pages.
Goal of WAssociate is to give easy access to the Windows registry key HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT, because that's where associations are stored. Editing the registry can be tricky and is a topic for advanced users. Use WAssociate carefully and BACKUP your registry often. If you don't know anything about the registry and its HKEY_CLASSES_STUFF, advance with care.
WAssociate suggests it has an Undo. Do not rely on it.
NT, 2000 and XP users must have the proper rights to edit the registry to use WAssociate. If you are not sure you have enough rights you can find out by starting RegEdit, create a key beneath HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT and restart your workstation. If after the restart the created key is still there, you have enough rights and can delete it.
I did not test WAssociate on accounts with limited rights. Of course you can buy your administrator an apple pie and ask for more rights. Keep in mind that the settings you edit with WAssociate affect ALL users of your workstation, which is very handy in many cases, but not all. The personalized level of these settings cannot be edited with WAssociate. If you want to explore them you can find them in the registry key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts.
To install WAssociate simply download WAssociate.zip (343K) and extract this zip file to a folder of your choice, like C:\Program Files\WAssociate. The current version of WAssociate included in this zip is Also included you'll find all the pages from this site related to WAssociate. After you unzipped the archive, you can read this documentation by opening index.html.
To make WAssociate accessible from the 'Send to' context menu of Explorer, you can place a shortcut to WAssociate.exe in your SendTo folder (Like c:\windows\SendTo). You can find a description of the SendTo folder in Windows Help.
An introduction to associations | Home |