Try a reboot after disabling DDE to help the change sink in??

Odd, I never paid attention to the DDE info in file associations. Yet now that I'm using Access as a data source for Word merges, I'm enabling and disabling DDE (in Access) often. What does it do for file associations that's so bad?

And secondly, of course it's broken. XP went out of its way to break long standing core functionality in every area of the operating system. A huge leap back in UI from 2k and 9x.