Windows Explorer extension; File Identicons

[Amaroq_Starwind]

To my knowledge, the shell for Windows Explorer still supports extensions of various types, provided that they are correctly programmed and meet certain security criteria.

With that said, it would be nice to see an extension for Windows Explorer where any file that did not already have an icon and/or thumbnail would show an Identicon representing the file's hash. This would make it easier to identify from a glance if the file has ever been changed.

Thoughts?

[exile360]

It might be possible to write a program to do that.  It would need to configure Windows to associate any unknown file type with the program so that it would display the correct icon/info though, but in all likelihood to truly accomplish that for any file, the program itself would need to monitor the filesystem and act on appropriate files accordingly.  The problem is that once a particular file/file type has been associated with that hypothetical program, that file/file type would not be associated with whatever app it would normally be associated with, though that should theoretically be fixed by installing the program the file type should be associated with (for example, installing Adobe Reader so that .PDF files become associated with it instead of the hashing app).

I don't know too much about the APIs involved though, so I'm not positive it's even feasible, but I am at least somewhat familiar with how default icons and file associations in Windows work.