I noticed recently that apps that I have installed on my Window VM are showing up on the "Open With" menu on the Mac side, i.e. when I right click on a text document, one of the options under "Open With" is Notepad. Some may consider this a feature, but I find it very annoying because if I accidentally select one of these apps (easy to do since there's no indication that these are Windows apps) it fires up Parallels, which is usually not what I want. (The only reason I have Parallels is that I sometimes need to test web pages on IE. Otherwise I never run Windows.) Is there any way to disable this behavior?
This is a feature callled "Smartselect". You can disable it from Parallels menu -> Virtual Machine -> Configure -> Features -> Shared Applications. Just uncheck "Enable Smartselect" and "Share Windows applications with Mac OS X" options.