File version information does not appear in the property sheet for some files

Raymond Chen

A customer reported that file version information does not appear on the Details page of the property sheet which appears when you right-click the file and select Properties. They reported that the problem began in Windows 7.

The reason that the file version information was not appearing is that the file’s extension was .xyz. Older versions of Windows attempted to extract file version information for all files regardless of type. I believe it was Windows Vista that changed this behavior and extracted version information only for known file types for Win32 modules, specifically .cpl, .dll, .exe, .ocx, .rll, and .sys. If the file’s extension is not on the list above, then the shell will not sniff for version information.

If you want to register a file type as eligible for file version extraction, you can add the following registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
 \Software
  \Microsoft
    \Windows
      \CurrentVersion
        \PropertySystem
          \PropertyHandlers
            \.XYZ
             (Default) = REG_SZ:"{66742402-F9B9-11D1-A202-0000F81FEDEE}"

(Thanks in advance for complaining about this change in behavior. This always happens whenever I post in the Tips/Support category about how to deal with a bad situation. Maybe I should stop trying to explain how to deal with bad situations.)

Raymond Chen

Follow