F5F Stay Refreshed Software Operating Systems When you double-click a file, it launches the app but does not open the real file.

When you double-click a file, it launches the app but does not open the real file.

When you double-click a file, it launches the app but does not open the real file.

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Straya_Mate
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03-14-2021, 03:21 AM
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With the Windows 11 updates in October 2025, we uncovered another factor contributing to this problem. Several discussions have been made about assigning the software a specific file extension, managing permissions, inspecting the registry for "%1", detecting duplicate executables, etc.

This concern pertains to applications built with VB6 or VisualBasic 6, and it might also affect VisualBasic for Applications (VBA).

We discovered that before the recent updates 25H2 and 2025-10, double-clicking a file would transmit it as plain text to the application. The software's Command$ would then receive something like:
c:\myfile.txt
and open it.

With the latest updates, Windows wraps this in quotes and sends:
"c:\myfile.txt"

In VisualBasic 6, a DIR() command fails to process it correctly and returns an error. Before these changes, the DIR() would return an empty string if it couldn't locate a file. Depending on how errors were handled, this could cause the file opening process to fail entirely. For example, if sfile1 equals "c:\myfile.txt" and sfile2 is ""c:\myfile.txt"" the extra quotes trigger an error. This situation becomes unclear because when defining strings, we use double quotes, but problems arise when the string itself starts and ends with them.
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S
Straya_Mate
03-14-2021, 03:21 AM #1

With the Windows 11 updates in October 2025, we uncovered another factor contributing to this problem. Several discussions have been made about assigning the software a specific file extension, managing permissions, inspecting the registry for "%1", detecting duplicate executables, etc.

This concern pertains to applications built with VB6 or VisualBasic 6, and it might also affect VisualBasic for Applications (VBA).

We discovered that before the recent updates 25H2 and 2025-10, double-clicking a file would transmit it as plain text to the application. The software's Command$ would then receive something like:
c:\myfile.txt
and open it.

With the latest updates, Windows wraps this in quotes and sends:
"c:\myfile.txt"

In VisualBasic 6, a DIR() command fails to process it correctly and returns an error. Before these changes, the DIR() would return an empty string if it couldn't locate a file. Depending on how errors were handled, this could cause the file opening process to fail entirely. For example, if sfile1 equals "c:\myfile.txt" and sfile2 is ""c:\myfile.txt"" the extra quotes trigger an error. This situation becomes unclear because when defining strings, we use double quotes, but problems arise when the string itself starts and ends with them.

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