How to change default program to launch Windows .lnk files back to normal

I sometimes through my work with in-house support see this happen. For some reason the user associates for example Internet Explorer or another program with the .lnk files, if asked what program they want to use to open the file.
This normally turns out to become a big problem, as all programs on the desktop and in the Windows Start-menu, now tries to open in the selected program.

You can fix this rather easily by following the below steps:

  1. Click Start Menu, and type: regedit in the Start Search and press <ENTER>.
  2. Navigate to the following registry branch:

    Replace the [ext] with the actual file extension that you want to restore . If you are unsure, browse through all the sub-key under FileExts.
  3. Delete the sub-key named UserChoice.
  4. Exit from Registry Editor.

After you’ve gone through all the needed extensions, reboot the computer and you should be ready to go.


