"How do you want to open this file?" dialog appearing at random after upgrading to Windows 8/8.1

Question

After upgrading my computer from Windows 7 to Windows 8, and continuing after I went to 8.1, the "How do you want to open this file?" has been appearing at random both when I'm using the computer and sitting waiting for me when I dismiss the screen saver.

Depending on which of the seemingly random applications I pick, I either get the application opening to its default state when no file/location is selected, or an error message complaining that "C:\program" is not a valid file (exact error wording varies between applications), one example is:

How can I track down where this is coming from? My first thought was to check the event log, but without some idea of what to search for there's too much noise there to find anything useful.

Answer 1

I had this exact set of symptoms, except that I was seeing the "How do you want to open this file? dialog appearing every morning when I first sat down at the computer rather than randomly.

I eventually tracked it down to a defragmenter program called MyDefrag (Note: site seems to be down currently). When you install MyDefrag, it optionally sets up a scheduled task to run at 5:01 AM every day to defragment your hard disk, and I had chosen that option. But the scheduled task that MyDefrag creates is misconfigured in some way that I haven't yet figured out, because when you run it manually, it pops up the "How do you want to open this file?" dialog. I eventually disabled the MyDefrag scheduled task and only ran MyDefrag manually, and the "open this file" dialogs went away.

In your case, if you haven't already given up and reformatted your computer, I'd suggest making a note of the exact time of day when you see the "How do you want to open this file?" dialog. Then after you've gotten enough times to establish a pattern (e.g., maybe it pops up every 2 hours starting from the time when the computer first boots up), then load up Task Scheduler and start browsing through the active tasks looking for one that fits that pattern. Once you find it, disable it (don't delete it yet, in case you haven't found the right one yet) and see if the problem goes away.

In my case, it took me a long time to track down the pattern, because the dialog was only popping up while I was asleep. I eventually found it by running ProcMon.exe (Process Monitor, a very handy part of Windows SysInternals) at night and looking through its data in the morning. (I had to trim it down first, because 8 hours of Process Monitor monitoring produced about 16 GB of data, and every single filter operation was taking 10 minutes to complete.) I filtered for the program OpenWith.exe, and found that it was running at 5:01 AM. That gave me the clue to look in Task Scheduler for tasks running at 5:01, which is how I found MyDefrag's misconfigured automatic task.

If you haven't yet wiped and reinstalled your operating system and you're still dealing with this random popup, I hope this helps you track it down. If you've already wiped and reinstalled, hopefully someone else who Googles this problem will be able to use this information to track down their own issue.

Answer 2

I had the same problem. It came from task scheduler. I upgrade from win7 to win10, I did not know the tasks weren't working like in windows 7.

In my case these popups came from autohotkeys & python tasks that were not updated.

You can test if it's coming from the scheduler: just right-click/run on each task, the popup will show for the task.

You will then just need to update it following this answer

PS1: if a task does not run as expected this answer explains how to troubleshoot it:

... get additional relevant information from the events log. Open Event Viewer (right-click on Start). In the left panel select 'Applications and Service Log', then 'Microsoft', then 'Windows', then 'TaskScheduler', the 'Operational'. You might find that the associated middle panel is empty because this log is disabled. In this case, right-click on 'Operational' and enable it temporarily

ps2: winspector spy was also handy, I found out in the log panel that some process were "destroyed". So I knew they were coming from the task scheduler.