Thanks to Cerio, Andrew and Noel for your replies.

I have tried all suggestions both here and in the other links suggested. I even deleted the relevant association keys in the registry manually to make sure they did not exist and then re-associated again. The problems are still there exactly as described in my first mail. Interestingly in the first mail I said the BB logo appeared very briefly (flickered) when attempting to load in a second file from explorer. It was that quick I could not actually see if it was 32 or 64 bit. I removed the allow fast bootup option in preferences and tried the second loading again. As expected this was not as speedy and the logo remained on the screen for a few second before disappearing. It was trying to open the file in the 64 bit version which was the one I had associated and was using.

I have spent far too much time on this. More time than actually playing my saxophone so I will open files from within BB until maybe an update will solve the problem.

Thanks again