badAdjective

Davey, Yes I did get a notification in this case. There was another notification (pasted in bold below, from my email) that someone named DennisD replied to this topic but I never saw such a reply here. Thanks for taking a look at my issue! badAdjective, DennisD has just posted a reply to a topic that you have subscribed to titled "Unused File Extensions Issue". The topic can be found here: http://forum.piriform.com/index.php?showto...view=getnewpost There may be more replies to this topic, but only 1 email is sent per board visit for each subscribed topic. This is to limit the amount of mail that is sent to your inbox. Unsubscribing: -------------- You can unsubscribe at any time by logging into your control panel and clicking on the "View Topics" link. Regards, The Piriform Forums team. http://forum.piriform.com/index.php

I agree that the initial culprits were in fact the several media players I toyed around with. I believe these media players attempt to make common file types their own, beyond just associating them as an "open with" scenario. Once you uninstall the media player, the OS thinks that this is no longer a used file type since the media player associated with it is uninstalled, hence CCleaner attempting to remove it as an unused file type. Seems that Vista allocates file associations in several different parts of the registry, as opposed to confining it to one, easily identifiable area. CCleaner doesn't seem to analyze and corelate these different areas. Seems mostly like a Windows bug rather than a media player or CCleaner problem. I believe the initial culprit was Winamp, which has had serious file association issues with XP and Vista across several versions. Once I uninstalled Winamp, a lot of common file types like .mp3, .m3u, .wav, etc. were deleted from the registry. Even after associating with a new media player, the correct registry keys were never re-written in Vista beyond the "Open With" keys. It's a shame how one or two software instals/uninstal;s can corrupt registry items. That's why I use CCleaner but in this case it seems to only have made the problem worse. Anyways, thanks for the help. A fresh Vista install and more careful software usage should solve the problem in the future. PS- This forum seems to have an issue with email notification of responses. I signed up for them and am not getting them when anyone replies, not even in spam folder. Just thought I'd point that out as well. Cheers

System restore is not an option unfortunately, but the other method totally worked! Thank you! I used this program's ability to create the file type all over again (even though it already existed, alebit elsewhere). What I'm curious to find out now is what registry value this program created to list the file type in the Vista associations menu, and why CCleaner wants to remove so-called unsused entries even though they are clearly still associated with a program. Any thoughts from the developer team? And thank you Hazelnut for you help.

Thanks for you reply. I have seen this link before but it is not relevant to my problem. I don't have an issue with associating a file with a program. My issue is that very many of my file types are not listed in the "Associate a file type or protocol with a program" menu. If you look at the link you attached, under method #2 for associating file types, that is exactly what I want to do, but my file types are not listed there! I'm trying to get them listed back! For some reason CCleaner removed them for the list of available file types. There must be a way to return the file types to this menu, there are just so many missing:

To start just letting you all know I'm running Vista x64 SP1. I know that Vista likes to take control of file extensions and some software has issues holding to its file associations. I had a problem finding a media player (Tried Winamp, Songbird, Foobar, etc.) that didn't have issues with Vista x64. This is what happened: 1)After I un-installed all the media players that didn't work, I ran CCleaner and cleaned out registry with all settings including "Unused File Extensions" 2)Ended up using Windows Media Player 11 and set it as the default media player for all it's supported file types. So now they all open in Media Player. 3)Now in Windows when I go to "Default Programs>Associate a file type or protocol with a program" almost none of my media file types are listed there (mp3, m3u, avi, etc.) so I can't change file associations from this menu. I can still change the program it opens with by right clicking the file, but all these files are no longer listed in this menu! Help! How do I get my file types, which are obviously being used and are associated with Windows Media Player, back into this list so I can individually change them when I want to? CCleaner did something weird here and I don't know what to do. PS- Unfortunately I did not back up the registry before running CCleaner. I know, I know. Stupid. Thank you all in advance.