Figure 3-11: The Notepad applet making a vain attempt to display a photograph
It’s important to understand that when you see a mess like this, you do not want to save the document!
If you do, you may never be able to open it in any program in the future! You need to close the program.
If asked whether you want to save the document, be sure you choose No!
That’s not the program I wanted
The associations that Windows makes between documents and programs might not always be what
you want them to be. For example, you might want to edit a picture in some graphics program such as
Paint Shop Pro. When you click the document’s icon, however, the picture opens in an entirely different
program. There are a couple of solutions to this problem:
Open the program you want to use, and then choose File Open from that program’s
menu bar and open the document normally from the Open dialog box that appears.
Or, in Explorer, right-click the icon for the document you want to open, and choose Open
With from the menu that appears. Select the program you want to use to open the file.
The section “Expanding Your Open With Menu” in Chapter 4 provides more information on using the
Open With menu. For now, we need to focus on one other type of program — the ones that aren’t very
compatible with Windows XP.