Suddenly, I can't see any .pngs in IE7. I've done some searching and found a fair amount of stuff from '07. Apparently, this has been a problem for awhile, but I haven't found a good fix, yet. MS might be ignoring this and handling it in IE8, or I've missed the fix. Came here because I saw Mike or Fubar or Whabbit or somebody awhile back talking in the comments section about finally straightening out all their filters after a giveaway screwed them up.
Can tell you this much: it's permission related. Other posts I found pointed out that if you run IE as administrator it works and it does for me. Others have disabled UAC or created a new User account. I definately don't want to run as admin., and my UAC is well trained, so I'd like to keep it on. I might go to the trouble of making a new user account, but don't want to go through any setting migration hassles. And it works in Firefox.
My .pngs are associated with Win. Photo Gallery, and they open fine. Also tried associating them with IE, no luck. That didn't work for others, either. Tried a .reg MIME fix that I found on line that worked for some, but for some, including me, wouldn't completely load and doesn't work. Of course, some are using XP, some Vista, although there's a seperate fix file for both. Some of the keys won't load because the processes are supposedly in use, but I'm not sure of that. One person said that they broke it down into the individual keys and applied them seperately and had to change the process permissions related to some of the keys to get them to overwrite. Another said they verified all the keys manually and all were right in the first place. Also tried re-registering the .png plug-in by executing: regsvr32 c:\windows\system32\pngfilt.dll both in run and in and Admin. Commandprompt. Works for some, but most get a message saying it won't register because the entry-point DLLRegisterServer wasn't found. Then is says to verify that pngfilt.dll is valid. SFC doesn't find it as an error and one person replaced it with no luck.
There's suspicions online that installing another software causes this and the most likely suspects are Firefox and QuickTime. I don't belive Firefox, but QuickTime is a good bet. I installed a version recently, and it might have started happening then. Also, I found the same problem on an Apple board that speculated the problem with IE was a bug in the QT installer. But .png isn't associated with my QuickTime. Checked the QT preferences for that. One person had success by saying they disabled practically all QuickTime preferences, but can't tell if they meant only associations or also other things. Some have fixed it by uninstalling QT, but it didn't work for most.
I can always go exclusively to Firefox, but I'm annoyed because there's likely a simple fix SOMEWHERE. Since there was a mention of damaged filters here (though that may not exactly be my problem) I thought I'd try. Or maybe somebody understands how permissions are involved with this.
If anybody can help, I'd appreciate it.