VMware Fusion is a brilliant application allowing seemless use of numerous operating systems. However they’ve added a feature (enabled by default) that I would regard as more of an annoyance than a ‘feature’.

The default setting is to have OS X open menus polluted with the possability of opening documents with applications inside virtual machines. If I right click on a jpeg file for example, I get mspaint.exe, preview.exe, runasdll.exe etc… Should I accidentally click on any of these the XP VM will boot up, however more amusingly it looks as though it wont start the application (i.e. mspaint.exe).

To remove these context menu additions i’ve read numerous things about emptying LaunchService caches etc.. Turns out there is a correct way to do it.

Open the Virtual Machine Library and right-click on your Virtual Machine(s) and select sharing. You should be presented with something that looks like this :

Shared Folder
Shared Folder

At the bottom you can see the ‘Share applications on your virtual machine’, remove this tick and go back to normal contextual menus. :)