For those of you who are either complete computer newbs or have been living in a cave for the last 20 or so years, file extensions are the letters that are placed after the DOT in a file name. For example, you may have seen many extensions ending in a file extension mdi .txt or .xls or .doc or .anything you wish to put after the dot. File extensions are absolutely vital to how your programs work. In fact, if your PC does not recognize a file extension, it will spit out this following dialogue box.

In this case, the file extension for the file HUH.wtf, was something that I created to illustrate how Windows treats file extensions that it does not recognize. Since there are no records in your Windows OS connecting a .wtf with any known program, Windows will generate that dialogue box, with the assumption that you know which program to associate with your .wtf file extension.

The main cause of file extension errors/messages like these are Windows Registry Corruption issues. Basically, something has gone terribly wrong in your Registry to dis-associate a specific file extension, like a file extension dmg or in our case a file extension .wtf with its associated program. This may be a trivial matter for programs that you may not care about, but when you get into issues regarding programs that are vital to your day to day work, such as the launching .txt or .doc files with their respective programs, then the issues get multiplied. For those of you who don’t know, .txt is usually associated by default to your notepad.exe program and .doc is associated with Microsoft Word.

When this happens to you, you can either attempt to solve the problem yourself by using your Windows System Restore, or get a program that will auto-fix your registry for you. But at least, you are now more educated on what corrupted file extensions are and will be able to better fix those computer problems when they arise..

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