1.Did you check your drive to see if they are there and if clicking on, say, fax viewer, works?

2.How bout the old right click "open with"

(those are obvious)

What has changed recently in your system?

Look at your task bar after you double click the image file. Do you see a button with the WPAFV icon ( a kind of stylised mountain landscape). The text should be the file name of the image file.

If you do see the button then your WPAFV is there but off the screen. To restore right mouse click on the WPAFV button; select move; press your up arrow key on your keyboard; make big sweeping motions with your mouse until you can see the WPAFV window; left mouse click where you want the window to appear.

If move is greyed out select restore then right click again and select move (you can't move a maximized window.

Your WPAFV window may be shrunk down to the adsolutely minimum window size in which case you'll need to resize it.

When I 2-click on an image file, I get an hourglass for about 1/4 of a second then ... nothing else. No errors or sounds, nothing in the taskbar. In all the XP installs I've done this program has never failed to work, so I never have had to go looking for it before. It's not in the Start menu. I cannot find a relevant executable file. I can't add/remove it as a program OR a Windows component (odd, because I'm pretty sure that this was something you could do in Win98).

Haven't made any changes in the last couple of weeks to my system other than in- and uninstalling some computer games. Windows Help, Knowledge Base, and my google-fu are failing me. Totally weird.

Well, it's been about six months. I guess I should re-install anyways.

Tangent: why, precisely, have I had to re-install every version of Windows since Win95 every six months or so to re-gain speed and "oomph"? I've had about six computers in the last 11 years, all of them slowly noticeable degrade in performance until I re-install. I almost miss Win 3.1. Sigh.

Dang I was sure that was it, disappearing off the screen is a very common problem with WPAFV. WPAFV is a rundll32.exe process which is why you can't find it.

If you aren't running IE6.0.2x then upgrade, alot of shell problems are actually IE problems and are fixed when installing IE updates.

Also not a fix but a possible work around. If you have Office 2K3 the Office Picute Manager is pretty decent. You can set it to be the default image viewer by starting the program and then clicking on Tools -> File Types ... and selecting which ever files you want to open with OPM, all of them in this case.

For something minor like this you could also try selecting the repair option from your windows install disk (if you've got an actual install disk and not one of the stupid OEM image disks.)

RE Tangent: Win 3.11 was just as bad, you just think it was better looking back thru "filter the bad" rosy glasses. For example even FAT32 is much better than Win3.11's FAT16. Geez Win3.1 didn't even include a tcp/ip stack, remember what a pain in the butt getting Trumpet to work could be?

I have the exact same issue. Double clicking or right clicking and "open with WPV" produces no result whatsoever.

I just started opening pictures with IE instead.

Did you say whether or not WPAFV still is registered to open those filetypes? If so, is the path correct? Either way, can you run WPAFV directly?

What is the default action (which is bolded) on your right-click context menu?

So many things want to register as the handler for image filetypes.

I can't conveniently check how WPAFV is registered because I wasn't paying attention and I let Photoshop Album take over.

Have you used system restore recently (before the viewer problem)?

Is it possible that when the the WMF exploit thing happened you did the quickfix (un-registered Shimgvw.dll), then later got the official windows patch and re-registered the shimgvw.dll... but then later used system restore, taking you back to a state when it was unregistered?

If so, this should fix it:

1. Click Start, click Run, type "regsvr32 %windir%\system32\shimgvw.dll" (without the quotation marks), and then click OK.

At any rate, trying that shouldn't mess anything up.

OMG TAZ I LOVE YOU! I don't recall doing a system restore, though I *did* update a couple of weeks ago. You are the best! Thanks everyone for their help.