Photo Editor in Win2000

Topic

New Reply

I don’t know which board this question is more appropriate for, Office or Win2000, but here goes. I have Office 2000 installed on a Windows 2000 machine. This is a clean installation for both products (the Win2000 is an OEM installation, and the Office 2000 is new, not an upgrade). I installed MS Photo Editor as part of the Office installation. I have noticed that when I am logged on as an administrator or power user, I have no problems using Photo Editor (installed as the default program for jpg and gif files, among others). However, when anyone is logged on as an ordinary user, Photo Editor will not work. The program opens, but it will not open any graphics files. Instead, there is an error message saying that there are no file associations in the registry. Is this a bug in Photo Editor or in Windows 2000?
Fafner

Reply | Quote

Replies

Don’t know that it is necessarily a bug, but there could be a number of reasons for that happening – most likely a security setting that disallows normal users from reading a registry hive where those associations are store.

You can load REGEDT32 and make sure that HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT is available to all users. The file associations are stored there.

Reply | Quote

Thanks for your reply, Mark. I’m not exactly an experienced registry hacker, so after rooting around in regedt32 and also regedit for some time, I realized I had no idea what I was looking for. Any guidance? Also, why would a normal installation of Office2000 disallow normal users for photoeditor? I have no problems with any of the main Office applications.

Reply | Quote

First – I’m not entirely sure that this is the answer. It seems odd to me that normal users do not have permissions to use PhotoEd the wasy that other users would.

Second – and more important – try not to use REGEDIT.EXE for NT/2000 registry edits. The main reason is that REGEDIT does not support all of the data types that its clunkier brother REGEDT32 does. All that aside…

Go to Start -> Run and type in REGEDT32. In the multiple panes select the hive HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT and the click on the security menu at the top. From there select permissions and make sure that there is an entry for everyone.

I did think of another alternative, and this would be a little easier: when logged in as a normal user, find the file type(s) that you want to open with Photo Editor, and hold down the shift key while you right-click. Select ‘open with’ and then PHOTOED.EXE from the list, making sure that you check the box where it says ‘always use this program to open these files.’ That should register the extension with the application – whether or not Photo Editor has that available from within its dialogs is another question.

Reply | Quote

Thanks for the information on the two registry editors, Mark. I opened regedt32, selected HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT and clicked on security/permissions. There is an entry for Everyone. After closing regedt32, I logged in as a normal user and first checked My Computer/Tools/Folder options/file types. Photo Editor is shown as the default program to open jpg, gif, etc. files. If I right click on a jpg file and select Open with, Photo Editor is shown as the first on the list. Selecting that opens Photo Editor, but with the message box “no file format information can be found in the Registry.” Clicking OK yields another message box: “unknown file format.” Right-clicking the file and selecting Open with/Choose program and then selecting Photo Editor gives me the same message boxes. If I open Photo editor first, the program opens, but with the same message box. If I click OK and then try to open the jpg file, it’s still the same message. But if I then give that user Power user privileges, Photo Editor works just fine. So, still stumped.

Fafner

Reply | Quote

http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/ar…s/q260/1/51.asp%5B/url%5D

it has instructions on editing the registry to correct this known problem.

Reply | Quote

And of interest, straight from Windows 2000 itself. We both learned something today.

*****

Users will not be able to run most programs written for previous versions of Windows because previous versions of Windows either did not support file system and registry security (Windows 95 and Windows 98) or shipped with lax default security settings (Windows NT). If Users have problems running legacy applications on newly installed NTFS systems, then do one of the following:

Install new versions of the applications that are certified for Windows 2000.
Move end users from the Users group into the Power Users group.
Decrease the default security permissions for the Users group. This can be accomplished by using the compatible security template. For more information, see “Predefined security templates” in Related Topics.

Reply | Quote

Thanks for finding this information (I looked in the KB but somehow missed it). Interesting that Microsoft didn’t fix this in the first service release, since a new Office2k out of the box still installs PhotoEd as the default app for these files.

Fafner

Reply | Quote

Not to defend the Redmond giant, but this was more of an architecturla change to Windows that caused this as opposed to Office. The default security permissions for the ‘user’ profile are different in Windows 2000 than in previous iterations of Windows.

Reply | Quote

[indent]

---

(I looked in the KB but somehow missed it).

---

[/indent]
online version i bet the search engine online is really poor and i know of a number of things that can’t be found online. (I used the technet cd.)

Reply | Quote