About ten minutes after freshly rebooting my Win10 desktop,
File Explorer refuses to launch some apps
for which it has a “default app” file type association.
Doubleclicking on a .jpg or .png, instead of launching Irfanview, gives the File Explorer window an eternal hourglass.
Ditto for doubleclicking on a .pdf to launch SumatraPDF; .txt or .csv to launch Vim;
.html to open a new tab in already-running Firefox; .docx to launch WordPad.
Similarly, right-clicking on such a file shows an eternal hourglass instead of popping up the usual menu.
Similarly, Start > [ type in a filename ] does nothing, instead of launching the app with that file.
All of these apps work fine when launched without a filename, and file/open afterwards.
Some file associations continue to work:
.mp3, .mp4, .mov, or .wmv launches VLC;
.rb launches Ruby;
.afphoto launches Affinity;
.odt launches WordPad (although .docx doesn’t!);
.json, .yml, or .log launches vim (.txt and .csv don’t);
.tiff launches Irfanview (.jpg and .png don’t).
The only other apps running are Firefox, Slack, and Terminal.
Closing them doesn’t change anything here.
For Vim, in File Explorer the icon for .json, .log, and .yml files is Vim’s logo;
for .txt and .csv, the icon is the generic thumbnail of a sheet of paper with a few horizontal lines thereon.
That suggests that custom icons work.
But that’s contradicted by the custom icons for the nonlaunching apps SumatraPDF and Firefox and Irfanview.
What might be causing this failure? In particular, only some minutes after Windows starts? (Event Viewer didn’t show anything obvious near that timestamp.) How might I narrow down the fault?
