application association to wrong VM

I see several threads surrounding the topic of application associations not working quite right in a VM. I don't see the situation I'm having:

I have 3 VMs configured (Win2000, WinXP, Win7). I usually have Win 7 running, and the others are only there for regression testing of some software. I never run more than one at a time, due to paging/thrashing phenomena. However, applications like MS Word and Excel have versions installed in all three virtual machines.

Now, when I'm in Mac OS X and click on a .DOC file, for example, instead of opening it in the version of Word that is installed in my up-and-running Win 7 machine, Parallels instead goes and starts up Windows XP. I want to find the configuration file where Parallels associates file extensions not just with applications, but also with the correct VM. It knows that a .doc or .docx file goes with Word, but it doesn't know which version of Word to use. In my case, I would be fine if it always went to Win7; I'm not expecting it to read my mind, or even to notice which VM I have running. I just want to configure it to *always* open these MS Office apps in Win 7.

I'm running Parallels 5, build 9370. (Parallels 6 on order.) Mac OS X Snow Leopard. I've searched the various directories that I know of with Parallels things in them, and find nothing that looks like a file that might hold file type associations. Probably I don't know where to look. Or, maybe Parallels searches the various VM disk images for these associations, and what I need to do is get it to search the Win 7 disk image first. Just groping here.

Help??? Thanks.

 

Select the file you want to open with win7's excell.app right click on it and select 'Get Info'. Near the bottom of the 'Get Info' window you will see 'Open with:'. Look for the excel.app you want to use and select it. The button 'Change All...' will add the selected excel.app as default to other similar file types.

Hope this works for you