(cross-post added to Vista Perf & Maint)
"philtuber" wrote in message ...
This problem may have followed installation of SP2 on my Vista 64 HP, not
sure and haven't done a restore yet, hoping for a less drastic fix.


If I click on the Windows Update tray icon, or the corresponding control
panel menu item, I get a dialog box that says "explorer.exe" in the
titlebar, and the message is "This file does not have a program associated
with it for performing this action.."


I ran Sysinternals procmon a few times to try and see what was being
attempted,


Good idea. But before imagining what your symptom means
the tack that I would take is to try to expand the symptom description.
E.g. check to see if there are any other writes being done concurrently,
as these might involve some diagnostics that you may be overlooking.
Even without using ProcMon you might be able to detect such files
using a cmd window (probably running as an Administrator) with just

dir/a/s/tw | find "2009-07-06 12:2" | sort | more

E.g. assuming that that command was issued right after the error
message appeared, I would use a filter to make a sort manageable
You probably wouldn't need the more element of that pipeline,
even without the filter stage; it's mostly a JIC feature of it. ; )


and the only file with no association in the registry I found in
the listing was C:\Windows\AppPatch\AppPatch64\sysmain.sdb.
But wuauclt.exe appears to open that successfully.


FWIW I see this in XP:

cmd_output OS="XPsp3"
E:\assoc .sdb
..sdb=appfixfile

E:\ftype appfixfile
File type 'appfixfile' not found or no open command associated with it.
/cmd_output

But I've seen other cases where an association is given and no
filetype open action appears to exist. (E.g. in TechNet resource files
of various kinds.) So, evidently files with specific extensions can be used
without us knowing how conventionally.



Don't know what to do now.

Thanks


I think you are more likely to find knowledgeable help for this
from another Vista user and since I'm not on my Vista partition right now
I'm cross-posting to a Vista newsgroup. ; )


Good luck

Robert Aldwinckle
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