Which reasons could make ShellExecute fail?

winapi file vb6 registry shellexecute
MicSim picture MicSim · Jul 28, 2009 · Viewed 21.1k times · Source

I have a VB6 application which opens files with their associated application using:

ShellExecute(0, "open", filename, params, vbNullString, vbNormalFocus)

This works perfectly.

Now I got a customer (running XP with Adobe Reader) who can't open any PDF file using the above command. But the same file is being opened without any problems when double clicking it from Windows Explorer. I also tested the filename/-path combination on my machine to exclude those kind of problems.

I'm searching for any hints on what I could check to make sure ShellExecute is working. Or what can cause ShellExecute to fail this way?

Answer

Thomas Freudenberg picture Thomas Freudenberg · Jul 28, 2009

What's the return value of ShellExecute? If it's 0x0000001f (== 31, meaning SE_ERR_NOASSOC), than according to shellapi.h "There is no application associated with the given file name extension.", which means that somehow the registration of the .pdf file extension got lost. Reinstalling Adobe Reader might help.

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