Sign Up

Sign Up to our social questions and Answers Engine to ask questions, answer people’s questions, and connect with other people.

Have an account? Sign In

Have an account? Sign In Now

Sign In

Login to our social questions & Answers Engine to ask questions answer people’s questions & connect with other people.

Sign Up Here

Forgot Password?

Don't have account, Sign Up Here

Forgot Password

Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive a link and will create a new password via email.

Have an account? Sign In Now

You must login to ask a question.

Forgot Password?

Need An Account, Sign Up Here

Please briefly explain why you feel this question should be reported.

Please briefly explain why you feel this answer should be reported.

Please briefly explain why you feel this user should be reported.

Sign InSign Up

The Archive Base

The Archive Base Logo The Archive Base Logo

The Archive Base Navigation

  • SEARCH
  • Home
  • About Us
  • Blog
  • Contact Us
Search
Ask A Question

Mobile menu

Close
Ask a Question
  • Home
  • Add group
  • Groups page
  • Feed
  • User Profile
  • Communities
  • Questions
    • New Questions
    • Trending Questions
    • Must read Questions
    • Hot Questions
  • Polls
  • Tags
  • Badges
  • Buy Points
  • Users
  • Help
  • Buy Theme
  • SEARCH
Home/ Questions/Q 6014803
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Editorial Team
Asked: May 23, 20262026-05-23T02:44:44+00:00 2026-05-23T02:44:44+00:00

I use ShellExecute to open files. On a single machine among 2000+ users I

  • 0

I use ShellExecute to open files. On a single machine among 2000+ users I cannot open doc files. docx are opened with Wordpad.

Word 2010 is correctly installed and from explorer double cliicking on a word file opens word correctly, moreover the doc is showing with the correct icon in explorer. Note that all the other files work ok (like xls, xlsx, pdf, …)

Does anyone know why? I checekd and “use this application to open files” it is checked.

In code I check the error and I know that the error message is

SE_ERR_ASSOCINCOMPLETE or SE_ERR_NOASSOC

(becuase in both cases I show an error “no appliaction is associated with the type of file”, so i don’t know which of the errors is there, I shuold debug at customer end to see it, but I don’t think it is so important in this case).

Has anyone an idea? This is what I use to open the file:

ShellExecute(0, 'open', PWideChar(MyFilePath), '', '', SW_SHOWNORMAL);

Note: it looks to me some like problem is there in windows registry for this machine, it is a almost fresh windows 7 machine.

NOTE for who is voting for closing this question as Off Topic: it is in fact a question on WinAPI: why this api doesn’t work as expected when from explorer it does? So this is not off topic, expecially winapi is in tags.

  • 1 1 Answer
  • 0 Views
  • 0 Followers
  • 0
Share
  • Facebook
  • Report

Leave an answer
Cancel reply

You must login to add an answer.

Forgot Password?

Need An Account, Sign Up Here

1 Answer

  • Voted
  • Oldest
  • Recent
  • Random
  1. Editorial Team
    Editorial Team
    2026-05-23T02:44:45+00:00Added an answer on May 23, 2026 at 2:44 am

    This is just a guess, but I suspect Explorer is using NULL where you have “open”. This can trigger subtly different behavior if there’s anything amiss in the user’s registered file associations. For example, if there’s a default verb other than “open”.

    • 0
    • Reply
    • Share
      Share
      • Share on Facebook
      • Share on Twitter
      • Share on LinkedIn
      • Share on WhatsApp
      • Report

Sidebar

Related Questions

I am trying to use ShellExecute to open a file in Excel. I was
I can use the windows ShellExecute function to open a file with no problems
Usually, I use: ShellExecute(0, 'OPEN', PChar(edtURL.Text), '', '', SW_SHOWNORMAL); How can I have the
Use case: user clicks the link on a webpage - boom! load of files
I use the ShellExecute command to run an exe file which gets an input
I open up a notepad from my program using Process.Start() but the new opened
I'm trying to open the editor associated with 'txt' files - here's the rub
I have some fairly straightforward code to open up files using a Process object:
Can I use CreateProcess (or ShellExecute , or any other means of invoking cmd.exe
I'm using ShellExecute to open the user's default browser to a specific web site.

Explore

  • Home
  • Add group
  • Groups page
  • Communities
  • Questions
    • New Questions
    • Trending Questions
    • Must read Questions
    • Hot Questions
  • Polls
  • Tags
  • Badges
  • Users
  • Help
  • SEARCH

Footer

© 2021 The Archive Base. All Rights Reserved
With Love by The Archive Base

Insert/edit link

Enter the destination URL

Or link to existing content

    No search term specified. Showing recent items. Search or use up and down arrow keys to select an item.