full-disclosure - Window's O/S

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Date: Thu Nov 24 12:08:41 2005
From: brian at dessent.net (Brian Dessent)
Subject: Window's O/S

Cassidy Macfarlane wrote:

> This seems to be a 'nearest path' issue - iexplore would use notepad.exe
> to 'view source' by default, so when you choose to 'view source',
> Windows looks to the PATH variable to find notepad.

IE first looks for the key

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\View Source Editor\Editor Name

If present, it uses its value as the name of the editor to launch.  If
absent it seems to use a hardcoded default of just "notepad" without any
qualifying path.

It then searches starting on the desktop (and then presumably on the
path) to find "notepad.*".  The first hit that it finds, it uses the
standard shell launch method based on the class.  In this case that
turns out to be HKCR\Folder\shell\open, which launches explorer.

If you change the above "Editor Name" key to something with a qualified
path such as "c:\winxp\system32\notepad.exe" you get notepad despite a
folder on the desktop named notepad.  Similarly, if you set the above
key to an unqualified "foobar" and have a folder named foobar on the
desktop, it gets opened.  There's nothing special about "notepad" other
than that's IE's built-in default.

Brian