"open with" wakes external hard drive

Whenever I use "open with" from the contextual menu or the similar "edit with" in Transmit, the system looks for apps on my external hard drives. This slows things down and unnecessarily wakes the drives.
Those drives are set not to be indexed by spotlight. Is there a way to prevent LaunchServices from looking at them as well, and ONLY look at my primary drive for apps?
Eric

unmount the external drive and run the following terminal command
/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user
this will rebuild the launch services database and remove any entries from the external drives from it. however, if you open any folder on the external containing an application, it will be added to the launch services database and this behavior will resume.

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