Mac Forum / General / General / May 2008

Spotlight defaults to not searching for system-related files, so perhaps
that's the explanation. If you do your search via the Finder's Find...
command instead of from the Spotlight menu, you can go to Other... in
the menu that defaults to Kind and add System Files as a kind you can
search for.

Beware that messing with System Files can have dire consequences,
though, so be sure your backup strategy is sound and your backup is up
to date before proceeding.

Have you looked in the Parallels documentation? It seems to me like you should.

Cheers,

Chris

When Launch Services updates its database, it examines all applications
on all mounted volumes, building a list of file types and all
applications that report the ability to access that type of file. Often,
the result is duplicate entries in the various menus that display such
application lists, such as the Open With menu.

The reason the Windows version of VLC is appearing in the "Open With"
menu is because Parallels Desktop or vmWare Fusion made the Windows
version of that application available to Launch Services in Mac OS X.

If there happens to be a system directory that somehow reflects some
data in the Launch Services database, manually changing files in that
directory will almost certainly *not* change the internal database, and
may cause problems with the way Mac OS X uses the database - so I
recommend you not make such changes.

What you want to do, instead, is remove a given application from the
Launch Services database. Apple doesn't provide a way to do this, though
(of which I'm aware, anyway).

Both Parallels Desktop and vmWare Fusion have functionality that allows
Windows applications to be accessible from within Mac OS X.

With Parallels Desktop, the feature in question is called SmartSelect:

<http://www.parallels.com/en/products/desktop/features/smartselect/>

You can control this feature by editing the virtual machine
configuration (Edit > Virtual Machine) and accessing the Shared
Applications panel. Disabling SmartSelect may be enough - or you may
need to disable Windows application sharing altogether. Note: After
turning either feature off in the Parallels Desktop application, you
reportedly have to rebuild the Launch Services database manually (see
below for instructions) for the change to take effect on the Mac side.

With vmWare Fusion, I'm not sure how to (or whether you even can)
control  this functionality. I did a quick scan of vmWare preferences
and virtual machine settings, and scanned vmWare's Fusion web page as
well, but didn't see anything promising. It's obvious to me that there
are possibly critical insecurities associated with sharing this type of
information with Mac OS X. And I know vmWare's development team is more
resistant to adding functionality that diminishes security. So it
wouldn't surprise me if this Launch Services problem simply doesn't
happen with vmWare Fusion.

You can rebuild the Launch Services database with the Mac OS X built-in
'lsregister' command-line tool, which should clear old, crufty stuff
from it. Here's howo to do it in Leopard:

/System/Library/Frameworks//CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/
LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister-kill -r -domain
local -domain system -domain user

In earlier Mac OS X versions, Apple placed the Launch Services framework
in a difference directory. Google will show you where that is, if needed.

Hope this helps.