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I've finally upgraded to Windows 7 at work. However, I find myself unable to drag documents onto certain pinned icons on the taskbar and have the apps that own those icons open the file. Seemingly nothing happens, at least with programs I've installed under my own profile (I don't have access to install system-wide).

I have noticed that we now have to hold Shift to open documents this way; otherwise it just pins the document to the icon's menu. But doing this doesn't help me with my user-installed apps.

Some of the apps I've tried and failed with are Vim, jEdit, and WinMerge; when placed in a taskbar toolbar, these all used to be perfectly adept at accepting dropped files (under Windows XP). Notepad, on the other hand, does accept shift-drops; and all of these programs' windows accept dropped files once they're already open.

Is there a way I can make these obstinate app icons accept drops too?

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    What happens if you Shift+drop while running WinMerge etc. as Admin?
    – Karan
    May 28, 2013 at 22:46
  • I don't have admin access. May 28, 2013 at 23:26
  • Are there any virtual machines running?
    – Ben Plont
    May 28, 2013 at 23:34
  • Ben: I'm pretty sure there aren't. I haven't started any, in any case. How would that affect things? May 29, 2013 at 1:50

1 Answer 1

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I think maybe I've run up against a mistaken assumption of mine about the functionality of pinned icons (though I'm anxious to hear any solution that would make them work as I'd like). Due to an unrelated issue my IT department has temporarily given me admin rights, and I see that now I can shift-drop a single file onto a pinned icon and have that icon's program open the file. However, dragging multiple files still isn't allowed (I get the black circle-crossed-out symbol). I'm unsure if dragging a single file will also work when I lose my admin access, but Karan might have a point, if not.

In the meantime, I see that taskbar toolbars are still available and seem to behave the same as they did in XP (when I wrote my question I forgot to mention that the program icons I had been using were on a toolbar).

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