Removing the open with associations from Windows 7

Arrrgghhh !!!

ARRRGGHHH !!!

I was foolish enough to upgrade from 8.0.1 (something) to the current 8.0.18608 and once again I see Parallels has installed otions, without prompting or warning or notice, and now when you right-click on a file in Windows 7, the resulting file menu includes "Open on Mac" and "Show in Finder" options showing up where they did not previously. This change is ONLY a result of following the normal Parallels upgrade process and by no action of the user.

I do not want these options, as noted earlier in this thread. Before I upgraded I had managed to turn these options off (and No, YanaYana and other Parallels support people, I did not have a corrupt installation and did not need to reinstall as was mistakenly said by you in above). You can see in Post #22 I had to do this manually.

In spite of how I have configured the Virtual Machine, Parallels has overwritten my configuration and left no means by which to turn these unwanted options off.

Why do you folks at Parallels do this? It is simply wrong of you to do this without explicit user consent. In light of all the posts about such things Parallels still makes this error at the expense of us mere users - you know, the people that pay you cash for your application and have to pay if we want support.

OK, so I admit to ranting here but for good reason.

How can I PERMANENTLY turn these options OFF?

If I can't turn them off permanently (which is the case now) how can I turn these options OFF until the next update turns them back on without prompting or notice?

Please help.

Secondarily, please fix this annoyance.
 
Last edited:
I'm also having this annoyance. Could someone please tell me how to remove those Context menu items "Open on Mac" and "Show in Finder"?
 
Glad to know I'm not the only one. Moreover I discovered after paying to upgrade to version 9 that it is not possible anymore to run in Coherent mode without enabling applications sharing. Meaning the Mac OS Finder "Open With..." menu being polluted by countless Windows applications - I have many Windows VMs and Parallels create one entry per VM. For example a JPEG picture will get 3 "Microsoft Pain" from three different VMs. It's ridiculous.

I still have hope there's someone with a brain at Parallels to understand they're hurting themselves plenty. I paid Parallels to upgrade all the way from version 3 to version 9. I am so pissed of with this that I bought a VMware Fusion license and I am now migrating my VM, even though it will take time. A note by the way: VMware being the shrewd marketing machine they are offers a reduction using your Parallels licence.

For reference the answer I got from support after they spent 1 hour tinkering remotely with my screen:

"In the previous versions of Parallels Desktop there were two Coherence modes: Crystal and non-Crystal. While using Crystal, the level of integration between virtual machine and Mac is increased; the Application Sharing is required in Crystal. So, you were able to disable Crystal and use Coherence without Application Sharing.
In the Parallels Desktop 9 there is no longer division between Crystal and non-Crystal modes. There is only Coherence which is required application sharing. This is by design."
Click to expand...
 
Couldn't agree more ... why would this "Open with" option be required for Coherence anyway?
I didn't ask for this ... at all!

It's even so bad that in MacOS, the "Open With" option actually seems to prefer to open with a Windows application, even if you have a Mac application.
So if I simply double click my Mac file, Parallels gets started even though I have a perfectly fine application under MacOS X.
(examples: I use Lazarus Pascal, MS Word, MS Excel, etc on both platforms)

My solution: Remove Parallels Desktop completely, and work with VMWare Fusion instead.

Dear Parallels, even though your VM's work great, I will no longer upgrade to a newer version because of this crap, I've paid since v3 up to v9.
I'd reconsider if there would be an update (free) to address this, but I most certainly am not going to pay to get something broken fixed.
 
So I have Parallels 8, virtualising a Boot Camp installation of Windows.

On the Mac side, the Open With options keep including Windows programs that I never want to use.

I have done the obvious thing, set Configure, Security, Integration to Isolate Mac from Windows but this does not help.

Is there any way of ensuring that Windows programs are not offered to me when opening a Mac item?

PS Hansaplast's suggestion of removing Parallels completely did not work for me. Even after doing so, the Windows programs remained in the Mac's Open With menu.

(Later) I seem to have solved the problem for my installation, and this might help others.

I normally run in a standard (non-admin) account. Whether through action of my own that I had forgotten or through the way Parallels installed itself, I had a Parallels virtual machine in my admin account also, and there were Windows programs in Applications (Parallels) there, though not in my standard account. Isolating Windows from Mac in my admin account and also adding the Applications (Parallels) to the Spotlight privacy list cleared the unwanted items. I probably did not need to take both steps.
 
Last edited:
This f stoop!d problem still happens in 2023, 10 whole years later.
If possible, please respectfully tell the f imbecile who designed this "feature" that you literally can't start mac apps in windows and his idea was dumb.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top