I have more than a problem an annoyance with Blender and Windows 7.
Like most users, I regularly update my version of Blender to the latest; I always download the ZIP version, for convenience. In a new installation of Windows, I can right click the .BLEND file and navigate to the location of Blender executable, and when I double-click a blend file, it will open in Blender.
But when I download a new version of Blender and try to make it the default application for BLEND files, it fails to set it and I am forced to open the BLENDs in other less convenient ways (via File>Open in Blender, drag and dropping, &c.); so the file association is gone and the system refuses to associate BLEND files with blender anymore. When I re-install Windows, I can re-establish the file association, but when a new version of Blender comes out (and, alas, this happens quite often!), I loose the file association again.
Has anybody encountered this problem before? and, specially, is there any solution?
I have encountered this before. Seems to be a Windows bug of some kind. I never solved it. After reinstalling windows one time, I just made a Blender directory and instead of changing the .blend association, I just always unzip Blender to the same folder after cleaning it out.
Thatâs probably not very helpful if youâve already got the problem thoughâŚ
Open a command shell in windows and âcdâ to your blender binary, or browse there via your windows explorer, shift+rightclick the directory view and select âopen command promt hereâ from the context menu.
then type âblender.exe -râ
That should re-register the .blend in windows and hopefully with the binary you called the parameter with.
It is weird. I followed your instructions and everything appeared to work (see screenshot). But when I try to actually double-click the blend file, it prompts me what program I want to use, so in spite of the evidence nothing appears to have changed.
@Arexma. The user is administrator (in fact is the user hidden in Windows 7 admin); I hal also tried to run the CMD as administrator within the admin profile, but I got the same results.
In the past, Iâve had to go into the registry and change the setting that Windows uses to define what invoking âBlenderâ on a file means. I canât remember off the top of my head what that setting is/was anymore, but searching for âblender.exeâ will probably point you to it.
I finally managed to resolve the issue; it was a mixture of simple registry tweaking, CMD and some windows explorer.
To resolve this anno
Change the registry manually in the HK_CLASSES_ROOT\Applications\Blender.exe, to actually reflect the path of the correct blender.exe you wish to execute, followed by a %1 (for example âC:\blender-2.70-windows64\blender.exeâ â%1â).
<SHIFT> right-click the folder where the âcorrectâ blender.exe lives and open CMD there, then issue the command suggested by Arexma, blender.exe -r
At this stage if I double-clicked the blend file, still windows doesnât know what to do; it seems the problem is still there, but it isnât; you need to
<SHIFT> Right-click the blend, and select âOpen Withâ; now Blender executable is in the list; donât forget to tick the box âAlways use this program to open this type of fileâ, before Okeing the file association box.
