Quicktime is garbage.  It’s ugly, slow and useless.  But more than that, it hijacks some file associates and MIME settings.

Tonight I spent about 2 hours trying to make Quicktime let go of the PNG MIME association.  Why?  Because every time I opened a PNG in IE7, the fucking thing would launch quicktime and use THAT to display the PNG.  So, instead of ranting on further about how awful quicktime is, here’s how you cut that piece of shit off:

1. Run regedit.  Back up your registry – Be very careful about fucking with your registry, you can damage your install of Windows.  No, I don’t take blame if you’re too dumb to be careful.
2. In the following places:  HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Shell\Associations\MIMEAssociations\
   Delete anything to do with png, you’ll see keys like image/png and image/x-png.  Delete those.  Quicktime has placed those keys there.  Try out IE and see if you can display PNG files.  If you can, we’re done.  If not, see step 3.
3. HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT( and KEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes)\MIME\Database\Content Type\
   Look for the following keys:image/png and image/x-png.  Do not delete these keys.
   In these keys you should have these two string values:
   Name: “Extension”, Value: “.png”
   Name: “Image Filter CLSID”, Value: “{A3CCEDF7-2DE2-11D0-86F4-00A0C913F750}”
   Only those keys should be there, remove any extra keys.
4. For x64 users: Perform step 3 and include KEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Wow6432Node\Software\Classes as well as the other two locations.

I hope this helps someone.  Because, Christ, there’s next to NO info on how to fix this problem.