Lately I was asked if I knew a trick to stop VMWare-Fusion to open up movies on the mac instead of letting quicktime do the job.

It seems strange that some file-type associations are bound to a windows installation inside a virtual machine and it's even more annoying to have the virtual machine boot up. So I did some research on the net but did not find a suitable solution.

Inside the settings pane of a virtual machine you should disable the launching-feature but this does not affect the happening when it already happend. So the trick you have to do is delete the Applications folder inside your virtual machine bundle. If you did so your mac should not boot up your vm anymore.

Hope I could help you with this easy trick.