JAR file native support using Windows Compressed (Zipped)

[rudejohn]

I know there are shareware/freeware applications for natively viewing JAR files on Windows desktop machines (I use a few nice flavors of them at home). However, some people on my team don't have admin access and can't install said tools on their machines at work. It would be nice to use the native Windows support for ZIP files to open JAR files.

Here's what I've done so far:
Tools --> Folder Options --> File Types

If I select "ZIP" as the extension, one of the options is the native support I'm looking for, "Compressed (zipped) Folder". If I select JAR, that's not an option. Never fear. In my research, I found that Windows uses the file C:\<winroot>\system32\zipfldr.dll to peruse ZIP files natively. Although that isn't on the original list as valid to open JAR files, I browsed to the DLL in the Folder Options and clicked it. Voila! "Compressed (zipped) Folder" was now on the list of available programs.

But when I actually double-click to open a JAR file, it says the file is "not a valid Win32 application." If I rename the *exact same file* to *.ZIP, it works fine.

Any help? No rush on this one, but it'd give me great personal satisfaction to solve (and I've been beating my head against the wall for WAY too long, I'm not great with Windows).

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RudeJohn
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[sedj]

There may be an actual solution to your problem - but I doubt it.

Windows (for too long) has based its file opening operations on the file name extension rather than the actual data content. Ho hum.


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