How To Disable Shell Extension In FileOpen Dialog

Question

I am talking about windows shell extensions.

I have a shell extension which could show the specific properties of my customized file type, say, *.filetype. And of co

Answer 1

Create a shim dll which does nothing but load your real (big) shell extension dll. The only job of that shim dll is to check whether the current process is "explorer.exe". If it is, the shim loads the real dll and forwards all calls there. If it's not, the shim doesn't load your real dll but simply returns E_NOTIMPL or something like that to all requests.