Patent ID: 8387047

Claim:
A computer system comprising: a system environment; and an application manager comprising visibility rules; one or more virtual environments, each comprising an association table; wherein the system environment includes a shell extension configured to detect a request to perform an action on a file in the system environment, wherein in response to detecting the request the shell extension is configured to: determine that the action comprises opening the file; create a processing thread in the system environment; determine the file extension is not associated with any application in the system environment; apply said visibility rules to identify particular virtual environments of the one or more virtual environments to be searched for an association between an application and the file extension; query association tables in each of the particular virtual environments to determine whether the corresponding virtual environment includes an association between an application and the file extension; identify one or more of the virtual environments in which the file extension is associated with an application; apply selection rules to select a given virtual environment from the identified one or more virtual environments; move the processing thread to the given virtual environment; and open the file in the given virtual environment.