Controlling Evolution MIME helper associations?

[Mark Evenson]

How do I control Evolution's notion of the handler to associate with a 
given MIME type?

With the latest Evolution (2.22.3.1) build from ports, Evolution's 
notion of which handler to associate with which MIME type seems very 
screwed up when it comes to attachments OpenOffice.org and Microsoft 
document formats.  For attachments with "*.doc" and "*.xls", I only get 
a "Save As..." option from the associated context menu.  For files with 
"*.odt", I get a context menu offering to "Save As..." as well as open 
with "OpenOffice-2.3.1", "Archive Manager", or "Wine Windows Program 
Loader" which would be ok except for the fact that I have long since 
moved to "OpenOffice-3.0.0".

The file associations in Nautilus are correct (i.e. it knows to 
associate "OpenOffice-3.0.0-Calc" with files of type 
"application/vnd.ms-excel"), so it seems that something is overriding 
Evolution's notion of MIME associations.

The operating system instance has been continuous upgraded via 
'portupgrade' for about two years running, so things are undoubtably 
outside the normal path for upgrades, but I can't really understand 
where to begin here.  Any pointers?

For what it's worth, creating a completely new user accessing the same 
mailbox via Evolution shows the same behavior, so this seems to be 
something screwed up in the system directories as opposed to the user 
directories.

I did a little reading about 'update-mime-database', but since Nautilus 
knows the correct associations but not Evolution, that doesn't seem to 
be the correct path.

Any clues on what to look at?

-- 
<Mark.Evenson at gmx.at>

"[T]his is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into."