I just bought SuperDuper (which has a beautiful interface, btw) and used it to "defragment" my system drive by doing a backup and restore.

After the restore I had the above-mentioned file association problem.

Your one-liner seems to have fixed the symptom but I am a bit concerned about the underlying problem.

Also, and possibly related, my DiskCatalogMaker program crashed while reading its catalog. This is the first time I've seen such a crash from it. Just a heads-up.

The underlying problem is just that it can take time for LaunchServices to refresh itself. "Forcing" a refresh makes sure everything is caught up.

I can't tell you why DiskCatalogMaker might crash... did it succeed a second time?

DiskCatalogMaker worked fine after restarting.

OK, Joe -- that's good to hear. It's hard to say what might have been going on there without looking at why it crashed, but it could have just had a bug when it found itself running from a different drive...