Windows Picture Viewer cannot view gif or jpg.

[Tim]

I am running XP Home, and I'm not sure when, but I lost
the ability to view jpg and gif files with the Windows
Picture viewer. Bitmap and tif files work correctly.

All of the thumbnails come up correctly if doing a
thumbnail view in explorer.

When I double click on a .jpg or .gif thumbnail in
explorer an error window comes up with an error dialog
box stating the following:

Windows cannot find '[full path].jgp'. Make sure you
typed the name correctly, and then try again. To search
for a file, click the start button, and then click
search.

And Windows Picture viewer then comes up with No preview
available.

So the file associations seem correct.

My understanding is that the Windows Picture Viewer is
simply a dll (shimgvw.dll) that uses GDI+ (GdiPlus.dll).
I checked the versions of these dlls, they match another
machine that works. My guess is GDI+ uses another dll(s)
for jgp and gif files.

Does anyone have more information?

TIA

Tim

 

[vic L]

I am also having the same problem with the Home edition of XP on my
notebook. Still running fine on the desktop (XP Pro). jpg's and gif's will
not open, but bmp's will. If the program didn't work at all, I would
suspect that it somehow became corrupted, but to work on only one
filetype..... hmmm. Thanks.