When the decide what to do with this file dialog opens, you can browse to choose what application it should be opened with ("Open it with"). This file chooser should filter files as programs (and also offer an "All Files" option). The title of this file chooser ("Open") is also wrong. The chooser in Prefs -> Helper Applications -> Edit -> Open it With (Choose) works as expected (filters programs and has the title "Choose helper application".

Ok, it should only filter programs, not have "All Files". This would be a duplicate of 97322 . sorry. Changing to just the title issue. (Hope that's ok).

The program filtering it does is win32-only and very broken. (where are my .bat files, eg?) *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 97322 ***

wait. I misread your comment.

OK, so this is an artifact of the fact that we do all the same crap in all sorts of places... I'd rather fix this by changing the arch so the helper app service has a way to select a helper app (and then encapsulate the logic in there) rather than fixing every single picker ad-hoc. pkw, feel free to punt this to default owner, of course. ;)

Reassigning bug to default owner.