File association conflict between two applications

Question

I'm using an editor called Sublime Text and recently upgraded from version 2 to version 3. Both versions share the same exe filename but are installed in different directories.
C:\Program Files\Sublime Text 2\sublime_text.exe
C:\Program Files\Sublime Text 3\sublime_text.exe
When both versions are installed, it was not possible to change file associations from ST2 to ST3 since Windows treated them as the same application and started ST2 instead.
When I removed ST2 it was still not possible to associate files with ST3. When I choose Open with - Browse and select sublime_text.exe, nothing happened. The solution was to remove this registry key
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Applications\sublime_text.exe
as described here:
http://www.sublimetext.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=12928
Is this a common problem for all programs that share the same exe name or has the developer made an error somehow by giving both versions the same id?

Answer 1

This is a common problem. The problem is that the ID remains the same for both the versions. Therefore version conflicts occur. And that's the reason it's recommended to use only one version at a time. And so, most softwares are designed to remove their
lower versions before installing higher version.
If you mean 'upgraded', generally, lower version will be removed automatically.
So try removing both the versions, restart the PC, install the higher version, restart the PC and then check.
Balaji Kundalam