Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

Here’s a problem I ran into today: I control-clicked an icon on my desktop, pointed to the “Open With…” menu, and it listed two of every application. That’s not right, and I’m not sure what caused it, but I found out how to fix it.

Thanks to this page at The X Lab, I learned how to reset the Launch Services database in Tiger to correct my problem. The page also has instructions for Panther and Jaguar.

To fix your “Open With…” menu, open /Applcations/Utilities/Terminal, and type the following:

sudo rm /Library/Caches/com.apple.LaunchServices-014*
rm ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.LaunchServices.plist
The sudo command will prompt you for your admin password.

Then restart your Mac. The menu should be back to normal, although you will be prompted to confirm that you want to open the document you just clicked with the associated application.