MSPaint won't open from Picture Viewer to edit pictures
June 17, 2007 7:23 PM

When viewing a picture in Windows Picture and Fax Viewer, I cannot get MSPaint to open up when I click on the edit button.

It used to close the viewer and open Paint. I’m not entirely sure when it quit working, but now it just closes the viewer and doesn’t open any program for editing. A while back I installed Adobe Reader 8 and it came with an Adobe picture viewer which tried to be the default viewer. I also installed Quicktime and it added a Quicktime picture viewer. I don’t know if there was a conflict with one of these programs which started the problem.

I’ve looked on the internet and have only been able to find references to editing the registry and changing the file associations. I think mine are already ok – here’s the settings:

In the registry, under SystemFileAssociations / Image / shell / edit / command is:
“%systemroot%\system32\mspaint.exe” “%1”

In My Documents, under File Type for jpg/jpeg, it says that for Action edit: Program used to perform action is C:\windows\system32\mspaint.exe “%1”

I also uninstalled Adobe Reader/Picture Viewer and Quicktime with Add/Remove programs and restarted. Still no joy. I’m using XP sp2. I know I could launch Paint and open the picture to edit, but I would prefer to have it work properly. Please help. Thanks!
posted by nelvana to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)
Check out this thread. Also, try what is mentioned in there, when you right click on the image and press edit, does MS Paint open?
posted by B(oYo)BIES at 9:45 PM on June 17, 2007


What if, just for fun, you made it open in some other program? Does that load, or also do nothing?
posted by niles at 9:46 PM on June 17, 2007


Hey, thanks for that thread B(oYo)BIES. That describes my problem. And yeah, I can right-click on the image, choose Edit and it opens Paint. So even if I don't find the ultimate solution, I can live with that. Thanks! The thread has a link to autohotkey.com that may be able to find out what my ctrl+e key is doing, but the program looks to be beyond my understanding and I don't want to screw things up worse. I'll check around and see if there's some other way to find out what ctrl+e is doing (and how to re-program it to mean 'edit').

niles, thanks for the idea. I tried it and it seems to confirm that my problem lies with the ctrl+e shortcut as the behaviour is the same with another program.
posted by nelvana at 10:45 PM on June 17, 2007


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