The good news though is that I have since found a much nicer program for assigning your own icons:

Types

“Types” is a free and lightweight utility for Windows that allows you to edit program associations, icons, context menus and other properties of various file types displayed in Explorer.

http://types.sourceforge.net/

When I first tried it out way back in the beginning of last year I had a few difficulties but when I recently setup a new development VM and had a need once again to customize my clarion file associations I gave it another go. This time round they have made great improvements in stability and it performed beautifully and did what it said it would. No more, no less.

Hopefully someone will find this useful too.

With the move to 64bit the poor old Clarion IDE, which is still a 16bit application (!), was obviously not going to be running directly from the desktop. This is fine, I had long since moved all my development into virtual machine for just this reason. I figured this was a good time as any to try out the UAC and see if it really was as annoying as people have been saying.

Anyway, being that most of my development was going in inside virtual machines (Vista 32bit, UAC off) I really found very little issue with UAC. Occasionally I would trigger it off when adjusting various parts of the system but with a little ping and a flash (that bit sucks…) I am on my way again.

However, every so often I would find that the application I attempted to launch would simply freeze completly just before the expect UAC prompt would appear. Very annoying, and utterly un-fixable. Even from the Task-Manager it was imposible to kill the task!

I am still not sure what was the cause of this. It didn’t happen when I first installed the system and it has not happened in a while now so I suspect either a bug fix has been applied from Microsoft or a program I had installed was somehow interfering.

There is a workaround though… if you ever find yourself with the above symptoms try this: Hit Ctrl+Alt+Delete and then immediately press the Escape key. It seems that consent.exe (the one responsible for UAC) fails to gain focus occasionally. Those actions will bring it back to the foreground and you can continue along your way.

I originally found this helpful hint in the comments of this article.

By doing this I can have specific icon and type description for the file extension making it much easier to see these files in amongst all the other junk. Once these are setup and with windows explorer in detail view sorted by type the clarion app and dct files would be nice and visible at the top of the list.

Just like this:

But hang on, how the heck do you do that in Vista?

Prompted today by a comment on CW-Talk I looked into this again and finally found a solution.

In Vista they have changed the GUI for working with file association. The word I would apply here would be “obfuscated”. Most functionality is still there just in a few different places with a few special quirks.

“Associate a file type or protocol with a program”

Control panel –> Default Programs –>  Associate a file type or protocol with a program

Sounds like just the thing right? Wrong. You can muck around with associations a little but only if they are already available. No way to add a new one here, sorry!
Creating a new file association with Vista

You can do this by clicking on a not-yet-associated file which will launch the “Windows cannot open this file” dialog box.
Once you do that you will be asked:

If you select the “Select a program” options you then you then get something like this:
Whats missing?

* Although you can “Type a description…” here there is no easy way to edit that description later.
* There is no way to set the icon for this file association.
* It is not possible to remove an association once created.

But it is possible with a little hunting.

There are two methods I have found and each have their merits and drawbacks:
1. Edit the registry.

This KB article seems like it would still apply to vista – “Changes in File Types and File Association Features in Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003″

You can also specify icons and type desriptions via the registry manually if you really want.
2. Find a program to do the registry hacks for you.

Unfotunatly there does not seem to be many around. One I found is “File Type Doctor” in Creative Element Power Tools.

Its a 45 day trial and has a few odd quirks but seems to do the trick. Just watch out, the list of extensions in the File Type Doctor seems to have a display problem. If you navigate the list with the up/down keys it seems to work OK. Also, be aware that changes you make are real time. There is no Save/Cancel for this editor!