Windows Picture and Fax Viewer is one of the great features of Windows XP as it lets us quickly preview, rotate, print, delete, or edit pictures in the computer. It also lets us view the album as a slideshow one after the other.

Windows Picture and Fax Viewer is linked with Microsoft’s default image editor Paint. I started facing this strange problem that whenever I click on “closes this program and opens the image for editing” button in the bottom right of the Windows Picture and Fax Viewer, the image closes but does not open up with paint.

There are times when we need to make some changes in the picture or photo we are viewing and to avoid closing the Windows Picture and Fax Viewer and open the image in paint separately, we click on this button in bottom right. But every time I did this, I got this “open with” dialog.

Solution:

This is how I fixed my problem

1.    Open registry editor (type regedit in the run box)
2.    Now navigate to this key

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\SystemFileAssociations\image\shell\edit\command

3.    Take a backup of this key first (to undo any changes not liked by you), right click on command and click on Export. Then save the key as .reg file.

4.    Now modify the value on the right side and type this value

“C:\WINDOWS\system32\mspaint.exe” “%1″

5.    Click OK.

Similarly you can also change your default image editor from Paint to other like Photoshop, just enter its location within quotes like “C:\Program Files\Adobe\Photoshop 7.0\Photoshop.exe” and append a “%1″ after it (both statements with quotes).