I just came across a huge, terrible nasty, bug feature in Windows Vista. I was attempting to download a program (.exe) file from an FTP link in my email.

Instead of just downloading the item, Windows requests to choose a program with which to open the .exe file with. It my case, it chooses to use Firefox to open it. Unfortunately, you cannot uncheck the setting “Always use the selected program to open this kind of file.”

If you click on the OK button, Firefox now becomes the application launcher on your system which means that your system is now borked.

The only fix that I found (actually a friend of mine found it for me) was a reg hack that puts everything back in place.

This kind of bug feature is completely egregious. Why oh why is this ever ok?