About once a year, I run across some hardware vendor who does something incredibly stupid like packaging their drivers up into a RAR archive. Today's contestant is Promise Technology, Inc. and the drivers in question are for the Ultra 133 TX2 card I've got in my file server. This is the one I bought to replace my other failing ATA card.
Anyway, I don't really have any problem with Promise (although one of their engineers is probably a thief, as I don't think RAR is used anywhere outside the online pirating community anymore1) but I do have a problem with the WinACE developers.
Here's the deal: I'm so sick of WinRAR that I figured I'd give a competitor a shot for unpacking this freshly confounding RAR package—and so I snagged a trial copy of WinACE. And when installing WinACE, I was sure to uncheck all of the boxes where it asked if I wanted to register all kinds of stupid shell extensions for me.
After unpacking the drivers, I uninstalled WinACE since it's actually a bigger pile of crap than WinRAR. But once I did so, it removed my ability to create or open ZIP files in Explorer. Thanks, you dicks.
Anyway, here's the problem: regardless of its installation preferences, WinACE always unhooks the ZIP handler when it's removed from the system. This exists in the registry, under HKLM\SOFTWARE\Classes\.zip. I found that WinACE had reset the default key there.
To fix this, you need to change the default key in HKLM\SOFTWARE\Classes\.zip back to "CompressedFolder" as shown in the diagram above.
Obnoxious.
1 I suppose they could be a pirate, or just some arrogant ass who thinks that the superiority of the RAR format is worth infuriating every customer who goes to download this driver.
I use IzArc. It supports everything, integrates nicely, and is free. Never tried WinACE; what were the problems with it (before uninstallination)?
Lots of people use rar now. Pretty much all virus trading occurs in that format.
Mouser-
And the best part about IzArc is that it, "...is 100% virus free and it doesn't contain any spyware or adware."
Danny-
OK, sorry. Pirates, self-important nerds, and malware geeks.
--D
Mouser-
Oh, and what sucked about WinAce (and WinRAR, etc.) is clunky UI design. I've used a half-dozen pieces of software that all subscribe to the "Explorer view plus huge archival buttons" style guide, but the details are inconsistently implemented with atrocious fit and finish.
And, branding.
--D
Zipgenius works very well for me.
http://www.zipgenius.it/eng/index.php
Oh hey, good call.