It may come to pass that you want to install 7-Zip on your Windows 7 machine (no relation).  7-Zip is a great archive utility that can handle nearly any archive file you might care to throw at it (from zip to rar to iso to tarball and all points in between).  It also handles a new(ish) archive type with the extension 7z (comic book archived as cb7).

Of course you will want to download and install 7-Zip.

Now once you get that installed you may discover that it does not automatically assume archiving duties for all of the file types it can access.  Nope, it’s not that sort of invasive weed of a program.  It is ready for you; it puts certain items in your context menus so as to be easily available; but it doesn’t just take charge.

On Windows XP it was a simple matter of selecting a file of the extension in question, a zip file for instance, and asking XP to open that file with 7-Zip and making certain the check box for always opening was checked.  This probably ought to work in Windows 7 but I got a big fat nothing for my efforts down that path.

I am used to having to browse for 7-Zip when making the file association as Windows can’t be reasonably expected to guess that I want to use an archive manager to open a file with an archive extension.  No big thing.  However, after browsing to the 7zFM.exe (that’s the file manager) and selecting it and clicking the Open button I failed to notice that 7-Zip had not been populated in the “Open with…” dialog and so my file association went to the first item in the list: Adobe Reader.  Annoying but I’ll just try again.  Nope.  Windows will not populate the dialog with the 7-Zip file manager or anything else in the 7-Zip folder.

Surely though if I just open the file manager directly and go into it’s options (Tools —> Options… —> System) I can simply ask 7-Zip to grab those file extensions for itself.

Dreaming can be so pleasant.

It caused a ripple through my operating system indicating that changes may well be taking place.  Regardless, the icon for the 7-Zip file was still Adobe’s red icon and when I returned to the Options dialog in the file manager everything was again unchecked.

Nice.  The solution?  Open the 7-Zip file manager as an administrator and selecting the extensions will take.  You’re not out of the water yet I’m sad to say, though you are very nearly there.

Now, finally, you can open the “Open with…” dialog and you will find 7-Zip waiting to be selected.

Fuck.  I’m out.