I had an irritating problem with InDesign CS5 this week. It seems after uninstalling the CS4 version of InDesign, Windows 7 no longer recognised the default program for the .INDD file type. I presumed this was because when I installed the CS5 version the installer left the default version set to CS4 still and then removing CS4 confused it (a glitch in the CS5 installer).
Easy enough I thought I’ll just go into the control panel/default programs and reset the associations for that file type. When I did this however .INDD was not even an option in the file types, hence I couldn’t set a default program for it, and there doesn’t seem to be an obvious way to add a file type to the list (there may be one but 10 minutes on google didn’t find it).
Like I say this is an irritation more than anything as I can still open files by simply launching indesign and then opening the files from the InDesign menu, but it does mean I can’t just double click the file I want to open and have InDesign spring to life and open it for me. So I wanted to try and fix it really.
I had a look around and found what seems to be a similar problem in a past version of InDesign (CS2) on a forum (can’t recall where sorry) and they recommended a tool called ccleaner from London based Piriform Ltd (www.piriform.com). I grabbed a copy of this and used it to check the registry and fix issues in it. I then did a restart and low and behold .INDD now shows up as an option in the file list under “Associate a file type or protocol with a program”. 2 seconds later with the default program set to InDesign CS5 and everything works fine again.
It maybe this is specific to my setup and a lot of people may not come across it, but hopefully this helps somebody out there save a bit of time.
I should probably add that CCleaner makes changes to the registry etc.. so while it worked great for me and seems like a good tool, you use it at your own risk and if you haven’t got a recent backup might want to make one. And yes Alex I know if I had a Mac this wouldn’t have happened……
Thank you!
I just had the same problem and ccleaner worked fine for me too.
Your post was the only one I could find about this issue (via google).
This has been a problem since CS3. I just amazes me adobe hasn’t fixed it yet.
I’m running into the same problem in CS5. Setting defaults does not work.