Windows Now

I could be wrong, but I don't think this works under Vista.  It's one of the standard things I do when setting up an XP box, and so I tried it when setting up Vista for the first time.  I believe I got an error which indicated that the COM registration ability of zipfldr.dll had been removed.  

What _did_ work was a registry edit that I found at http://www.annoyances.org/exec/show/article03-202 .

Just wanted to pass that along.

good, I have used the zipfldr hack for ages, if they want to implement such things, do it properly, the zipfldr easly hangs/crashes you explorer when your never expect it..

damn thing..

Yep, Mark is right... good catch!

Funny, the built-in zip integration was one of the things that made me upgrade to XP way back when.  It just goes to show that milage definitly varies as I've never had zipfldr hang on me, and I use zips pretty heavily.  It's one of the parts of the system that has always "just worked" for me.

Why would you disable it?

Becaues I prefer to use an actual archiving program (Winzip back in the day, IZArc these days).  The built-in zip handling is mediocre, and as a power user, _I_ want control over what's going on with my computer.  Also, now that I use IZArc, I can treat a couple of dozen archive formats the same way, with one program.

Well you can still use software like winzip or winrar without disabling the Built-In Zip so I don't see why you should disable...

For vista THIS is the correct method to disable the integrated ZIP - via the registry:

http://www.annoyances.org/exec/show/article03-202

You want to disable the integrated zip if you don't want ZIP files pretending to be folders in Windows explorer and don't want the extra shell explorer extension options when you right click a zip file. You want it to go away and die.