Open With Entries

[zolotron]

Hi all and hope all is well in your world. I have asked this on a couple of other forums (wintenforum and MDL) but so far no answer and hoping maybe someone here has an idea. I clean installed Win 10 Pro X64 TH2 after rebuilding the ISO using MSMG toolkit and removing what I didn't want including the store. Everything works like a well oiled machine but, and it's really just cosmetic not a problem, when I right click certain files like jpg, zip or reg it has an entry in the Open with menu for 'Search the store" as per the pic which when clicked brings up a message saying "You'll need a new app to open this windows-ms-store" which makes sense as there's no store but I can't find the entry anywhere in the registry and all attempts to remove it so far failed. If anyone has an idea I would be very grateful

 

Edited December 11, 2015 by zolotron

[dencorso]

IMO, it probably is hardcoded into shell32.dll or maybe kernel32.dll...

[NoelC]

Purging all remnants of the Metro/Modern/Universal/App Store environment from Windows is a worthy goal.

 

I ran an in-depth text search with the latest version of grepWin, which will pick out ANSI or Unicode text even from binary files...

 

Text matches found in:  

 

C:\Windows\System32\en-US\shell32.dll.mui

C:\Windows\SysWOW64\en-US\shell32.dll.mui

(and corresponding WinSxS entries)

 

These support dencorso's theory.

 

-Noel

[zolotron]

Thanks dencorso and NoelC. I will try to use the equivalent files from the Enterprise or Enterprise N versions and see if that removes the entry in the Open With menu and if not will try to modify the exisiting files themselves. I'm using a test computer for this so no issue if it breaks the system. I agree NoelC it is a worthy cause to try and remove all remmanants of the apps not needed and also gain more knowledge about Win 10 which I believe was written by an alien monkey. I'll report my findings back

[zolotron]

Hi again and took a while with the holidays and life but when opening shell32.dll.mui with ResHacker as per NoelC suggestion I found in String No. 337 the entries 5382, "&Search the Store" and 5383, "Opens the Store to search for an app" and upon removing them and recompiling and saving the file then replacing the originals in C:\Windows\System32\en-US and C:\Windows\SysWOW64\en-US and restarting the text was gone but it left a blank space that when clicked on still produced the popup as below
 

 

 

After some more digging I found it in twinui.dll.mui which are in C:\Windows\System32, C:\Windows\System32\en-US, C:\Windows\SysWOW6 and C:\Windows\SysWOW64\en-US and when removing the entries 3106, "You’ll need a new app to open this %1!ws!", 3107, "Get “%1” from the Store" and 3110, "You’ll need a new app to open this %1!ws! file" and repeating as above after a restart the popup is no longer there but the blank space remains. I can find a reference to the 3106, 3107, and 3110 entries from the twinui.dll.mui in usercpl.dll file in the UIFILE section but removing these did nothing and not even sure if it’s connected and hope someone might have an idea how to resize that part of the menu. I also searched shel32.dll imageres.dll and others but so far can't find any menu or other items to remove that space

Edited January 17, 2016 by zolotron

[loblo]

I think you need to delete entire lines (starting with MENUITEM), not only blanking a string in order to get rid of menu entries. That's how I did it in earlier versions of Windows in shell32.dll (no mui files there and different  menu entries of course) if I recall correctly.

Edited January 17, 2016 by loblo

[zolotron]

Thanks Oldbie, I've done an extensive search of shell32.dll and other files and removed various menus and other items but none so far removed that blank space. Win 10 files are different from the other operating systems and even in 8.1 you could create a NoUseStoreOpenWith dword entry in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer set it's value to 1 and all was well but it doesn't work in ten and so far I've been unable to find what menu or others to remove and I did delete those lines entirely from the files but still the blank remains. I'll keep digging and hope to find it soon

[NoelC]

Keep in mind that if you change system files on disk you're very likely breaking system protection (i.e., the system will no longer pass an SFC check), and that there's a fair bit of automatic recovery logic (scan through all the Microsoft entries in the Task Scheduler some time).  You might just find that the system has restored the file on its own.

 

I fully understand that you want to remove all that store junk - I have the same desire - but this might be a case where we need to learn to just ignore that entry in the context menu.  The cure may be worse than the disease if the goal is to have a stable, maintainable platform for long-term serious work.

 

That being said, I've removed as much of the Metro/Modern/Universal componentry I can (while still having the system pass SFC checks), and so far it seems to hang together.

 

-Noel