Blog: WhizFolders, Articles and tips

This note is for those who know how to use the Insert Object menu to insert OLE objects in WhizFolders.

As a rule, you should not use the “Insert Object” menu to add JPEG picture files. Why? The JPEG pictures or files take enormous space as OLE objects. If you try that in any application like Wordpad or WhizFolders, it may appear to hang because it takes too much time to insert that object.

Instead, use the Insert Picture menu and WhizFolders allows you to reduce the JPEG size (by reducing the quality) that works much quicker and in many cases, you may not notice the difference in quality. You can also try Copy and Paste.

This means that the OLE stuff that is responsible for showing an embedded picture is broken on your system. WhizFolders needs a proper OLE server to show pictures. So does Wordpad. So you will see exactly the same problem in Wordpad. Please confirm that first.

Normally, the ole server that shows bmp pictures is Microsoft Paint. On some systems, it is Microsoft Photo Editor. There may be other graphics programs too that can act as ole servers. But the problem happens if an uninstall (or install) program of some graphic software breaks the registry links.

Here are some things you can try.

1. Click on Start–Run and type: regsvr32 ole32.dll. See if this fixes the problem.
2. If that doesn’t fix it, you need to tweak the registry using REGEDIT utility. If you are not comfortable doing that, please follow on to step 3. Here are the steps to perform with RegEdit:

   (A) Click on Start–Run and type RegEdit to start it.

   (B) Using Regedit, go to the key “HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.bmp”. Select .bmp key on the left as shown in the picture.

   (C) On the right, see the value of Default. The value that you have there might give some idea of the program that caused the problem.

   (D) Caution: Before changing that value, export this registry key to some place (File menu) so that you can restore the current value later if needed. You must save as .REG file in export so that you can restore it. Do not save as .TXT file.

   (E) Now in the right pane, right-click on Modify to change the value of Default to: Paint.Picture

   (F) Important: If this method fixes the problem, please DO NOT ask the program that had occupied this value earlier to associate itself with the .bmp files. Otherwise, you will get the same problem again.

3. In most of the cases, one of the above steps should fix it. If it doesn’t, try reinstalling Microsoft Photo Editor (if you have it) or Microsoft Paint (see steps later). But note that if you are using some other program to edit the graphic files then you may have to reinstall that other program. In that case, try these reinstalls only if you are confident that you will be able to reinstall that other graphics program or its file associations if things go wrong with it.

   For reinstalling Microsoft Paint, go to Add Remove programs in Control Panel and then in Windows Components–Accessories and Tools–Details–Accessories–Details, do a uncheck on Paint and remove it. Then do it once more and put ON that option to reinstall it. Note that you may need your XP CD for this. On Vista, this procedure won’t work, and I don’t know the answer on how to reinstall Microsoft Paint. May be you can get it back from some disk image you saved by a tool like Acronis True Image.

If the problem still exists, it is a case we haven’t encountered. In that case, please contact us. It would help if you send us the .REG file exported from the .BMP key that we mention above.