Running icewm, using thunar as file manager. I tell thunar to run kwrite as default app for *.txt files, and find that .doc files will open in kwrite too, showing gibberish. So i tell it to run openoffice for .doc, but now .txt files open in OO. It's as if *.doc and *.txt refer to the same file type before being associated with a default app.

No idea what to look at for further investigation (/etc has a lot of junk in it) or how to fix.

Don't know if mime types are involved at some point or not. No known weirdness in my .bashrc or any /etc config files. Used to work fine back in December, with no particular system change event to correlate this problem with. System is mostly Arch, though i've customized too much to bother asking at their forum. All software is fairly recent, maybe a couple months old at most.