Turn off / disable coherence

L

LFP

Bit poster
I am running desktop 3.0. When opening an e-mail attachment in mac OS coherence automatically starts parallels and opens MS word for example. How do I turn this off or turn off coherence all together. I went into parallels tools but the checkbox to enable coherence was greyed out.
 
LFP said:
I am running desktop 3.0. When opening an e-mail attachment in mac OS coherence automatically starts parallels and opens MS word for example. How do I turn this off or turn off coherence all together. I went into parallels tools but the checkbox to enable coherence was greyed out.
Click to expand...

What you're seeing is a new feature called Smart Select. It allows you to choose the application (whether Mac or Windows) you want to open up specific files with. Probably the easiest way to permanently associate the attachment to a Mac application is to save the attachment to the Mac desktop, then right click on the file and choose "get info". Go to the "open with" section and choose the Mac application you want to open that file type with, then click on the "change all" button.
 
Thanks very much for this fix. I just upgraded to 3.0, and when I tried to open an MS Word document in my MS Entourage client, it wanted to use Internet Explorer on my WinXP host OS to open the doc. This in spite of having MS Office 2004 for Mac installed on my OSX host OS, and MS Office 2003 for Windows installed on my WinXP host OS.

In this case it wasn't very smart, and do the obvious thing (open it in MS Word 2004 for Mac), or the next obvious thing (open it in MS Word 2003 for Windows).

The same problem occured with Excel spreadsheet attachments, but it retained the original default for Powerpoint attachments (MS Powerpoint 2004 for Mac). Could be a possible problem with the Smart Select setup on upgrade.
 
SmartSelect

I have to agree with the last post. This new "feature" is in no way smart. I have wasted a few hours today fighting with Parallels to work on my Mac in the way I always have.

Is there a way to get to this "SmartSelect" to somehow disable it? It seems that managing Parallels has become infinitely harder with this new release.
 
bliblong, I had the same problem with Entourage trying to open Office documents in IE on my VM. Very annoying. I did fix it, but this is certainly not very smart behavior. I do not like this feature nor do I want it. I certainly don't want my Mac automatically starting my VM and loading Office docs in IE.

Hopefully, in a future version, the user will be asked before the file association is changed by the install. (Actually, I'd be happier if they'd drop this feature altogether.)

Shepherdboy
 
I too have run into this problem today. It's (IMHO) no way smart and frankly I'd really like to turn that functionality off completely since I don't want my envrionments polluting each other ... is there a simple way to just make this feature go away?

Cheers,

- hywel
 
Andrew @ Parallels said:
Please updgrade to build 4560. It will allow you both restore original file associations and disable SmartSelect.
Click to expand...

How?

menu >> Applications >> set to default ???

the question is which "default"

OK ok better RTFM >:-)

Hugh W
 
I'd read in another thread that I should just uninstall Parallel Tools, reinstall with "custom" as the option, and deselect the favorites and shared application options. I did that, and things seem to be as I want (albeit that I have to manually fix my associations in both OS's).

Is the net effect of this new build different to my experience above?

Thanks for the help!

- hywel
 
So I did the new install. The VM configuration screen is quite clear now (and does exactly what I want - thank you!) but the application menu with the default etc is really quite confusing...

That said, I love Parallels, if seems to perform flawlessly, does everything I can think of, and was $80 well spent!

Cheers,

- hywel
 
Ugh!!!

I am having the same problem. Open an Office attachment in Entourage, it launches Word for Windows.

I installed update 4560 and Parallels would crash every time I launched it. The solution from these forums is to disable SmartSelect in the Virtual Machine before launching Windows XP.

So I did and Parallels doesn't crash when I start it. BUT, now I cannot reset the SmartSelect defaults because they are greyed out because I had to disable it in order to even launch Parallels. So it still tries to start Parallels every time I try to open a Word attachment in Entourage! UGH!!!!!!!

Come on! Fix this! I am tired of having to search your forums to fix annoying little problems that crop up everytime I install one of your updates or try to make your product stay in the background unless I want it. So far version 3.0 has really been useless for me. Just a bunch of little problems to deal with and no real perceived benefit yet.
 
tatnasty,

Please try launching Windows with SmartSelect turned off, click Start - Run - type "regedit" (without quotation marks) - hit OK - browse the registry tree to "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Parallels\Parallels Tools\TOOLS CENTER\" and change the key value of "UpdateSmartSelect" from "1" to "0" (double-click on it to edit). After that try enabling SmartSelect and running Windows XP again.

Please tell the results afterwards, it will also help if you provide your system configuration information (type of Mac, total amount of memory, Mac OS X version, amount of memory allocated to VM).
 
Hmm.

Here's what works for me with 4560.

Run Parallels with WinXP stopped. Click on any one of the Configuation items in the Parallels window. Go to Shared Applications item. Make sure both "Share Mac apps to Win" and "Share Win apps to Mac" are *not* checked.

Phil
 
Quote, "If you want to restore file association back to Mac, please click on menu Applications->SmartSelect->Set to Default."

NO: I want to restore file associations in Windows back to Windows applications. Right now several are broken, such as Excel .XLS for Windows.

I'm having this problem with Windows XP sp2, mac desktop 3.0 build 4560, on a macbook pro dual 2 core.
 
Blogthis said:
Quote, "If you want to restore file association back to Mac, please click on menu Applications->SmartSelect->Set to Default."

NO: I want to restore file associations in Windows back to Windows applications. Right now several are broken, such as Excel .XLS for Windows.

I'm having this problem with Windows XP sp2, mac desktop 3.0 build 4560, on a macbook pro dual 2 core.
Click to expand...
SmartSelect doesn't change anything in Windows file associations. It affects exclusively Mac file associations. If you have broken file associations in Windows it is most likely because of some registry corruption. I suggest you try to reinstall Excel or try some Windows repairing tools.
 
Actually, I disagree with that. All of my Windows file associations were broken too. Whether they were broken by the build I downloaded to fix the issues or the original build I ran - all Windows file associations were broken and had to be redone by hand.

- hywel
 
Hello,

With all due respect.. that is incorrect.

Parallels replaces all Windows file extension data with some kind of sub or little exe link to a parallels program; which then fails.

For example:

.XLS was excel.exe

After parallels coherence enable/disable, it became

.XLS now xls_auto_file

along with every single other file extension now broken, Parallels adds "###_auto_file" where ### is the now broken file extension in the view folder advanced propertiest list.

Please for goodness sakes fix this bug.

Thank you.
 
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