Preview Pane only shows icons

The preview pane (in Explorer) used to work fine. Now it does not - it only shows an icon for picture files (jpg / tif / gif /png etc.) I have not done anything intentionally to change the behaviour - one minute it worked, the next it didn't. It still works OK for wmv. I searched the forums and found reference to a utility called previewconfig, but that does not fix the problem for me. I cannot find any settings in Win7 to change this either.

Hello Sackbut, and welcome to Seven Forums.

In Default Programs, double check to make sure that you have Windows Photo Viewer set as the default program with all of it's associations set to it as well.

Hope this helps,
Shawn

That's not it

Thanks for the post Brink. I had already checked all that stuff both ways i.e jpg is opened by Windows Photo Viewer and Windows Photo Viewer open jpg. And double clicking on a jpg opens it in Windows Photo Viewer. So that all seems OK, but Preview Pane still only shows icons. Grrrrr !!

Since this has just happened, you might consider doing a system restore using a restore point dated before this started to hopefully fix it for you.