Prevent Windows 10 from resetting default applications?

My Photos app broke, somehow, so I got the nomacs photo viewer, but Windows does NOT like it. I kept setting it to the default photo viewer in Default Apps, but at some point in time it would be reset to Photos and my taskbar/desktop icons would all flash so I knew it would be resetting it.

I ended up uninstalling Photos with a powershell prompt, and now the default stays nomacs. Windows still tries to reset it to no avail though, so my taskbar/desktop icons still flash from time to time.

Any help would be much appreciated.

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3 Answers

Windows 10 is well known for resetting apps which the user has set by default.

• Press Win+R keys on your keyboard, the "Run" dialog will appear. Type regedit in it.

• The User Account Control dialog box opens up. Click on YES.

• The Registry Editor dialog box opens.

• Go to the following key

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\AppModel\Repository\Packages\Microsoft.Windows.Photos_16.122.14020.0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe\App\Capabilities\FileAssociations

and Further refer to

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That is the answer we've got from Microsoft when we opened the case: Windows would reset the associations to the default ones if some incompatibility found between the apps installed keeping the association and the system.

E.g. the older version of Adobe Reader associated with PDF will cause it's reset to Edge. Old version WinZip may cause associations reset for .zip files.

So, the solution is to keep all the external application versions installed compatible with the Windows build you have.

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Found the solution it's microsofts "realtime broker". Changed it in regedit (admin), under 'start' = 4 (never), rebooted, and opened up apps defaults and they did not change. CNTRL ALT DELETE task menu, check for "realtime broker" and delete it. This broker is only used for microsofts store. This is the spawned program that is changing all the defaults to mircrosoft (edge, emails, etc). Running Windows 10, 1809 64 bit.

Update. No this did not work. So made a boot up program to do this for me. first, edit your defaults as normally you would do. Then go into CMD as admin (critial as admin). Then save your defaults with (Dism.exe /Online /Export-DefaultAppAssociations:"C:\AppAssociations.xml"). Or something like this in a different location. Then create a text file named MS_Defaul.bat in this directory here the .xml file is located. Edit this file with the following. @ECHO OFF TIMEOUT /T 10 Dism.exe /Online /Import-DefaultAppAssociations:"C:\AppAssociations.xml"

save the file. create a short cut of this file, and move it to Startup file location, which is: C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup

Now every time the computer boots (10 seconds later - you can experiment this delay time) the DEFAULT settings will take place.

Caviot, the browser (firefox) never asks anymore if you want to change defaults, but on looking at defaults in windows its still IE, and Outlook. Hum... as long as it does not ask me anymore, I'm good with this mod. DONE.