A file is associated with a program so windows knows what to do when you double click it. For example, when you double click a *.TXT file, windows opens it using Notepad. A file association is nothing more complicated than that. What program is used to open a file automatically. And all files 'can' be associated with a program. The trick, then, is that sometimes files become associate with a program but you would rather it be associated with something different. That's no problem since you can easily change a file's association. This comes up from time to time so I did a search on file associations and came up with a microsoft knowledge base article (no. 307859)
http://support.microsoft.com/default.as ... duct=winxp
Note. Some programs will adjust file associations for you. For instance, TxRaw will work for *.RAW files and Podview will work for *.Pod files. In these two cases, the process is quick and easy and usually something you want. In other cases, a program will 'steal' file associations. In those cases, you must manually reset them the way you want. Check out the article. It's not hard at all.
