turbosquid
This is not really a question more of a snippet of information regarding broken EXE associations.... and a general gripe about the windows OS 
I switched to Linux a while back it's great and it works! Unfortunately last week i had to use my girlfriends Windows XP machine while doing so i was being constantly pestered by an 'information balloon' informing me that windows had downloaded some 'Updates' and that it needs to restart, firstly i ignored this but it just wouldn't give me a break so i ended up saving my work and restarting the damn thing.
It restarted i logged in went to open Deepburner (a free cd burning tool) and up popped 'Adobe Acrobat'! At first i thought i had made a mistake and clicked on the wrong icon so i did it again and Acrobat appeared! I then tried MS Word and again acrobat openned!! Very odd i thought so i tried going directly to the exe file
example :- c:/program files/deepburner/deepburner.exe
and executing it from there, but again i just got Adobe Acrobat! I eventually figured out Acrobat was not being directly executed as such it was trying to load the deepburner.exe file, this pointed me to the file associations.
In checking the file associations i found that for some reason .EXE was not listed at all.
To fix .EXE file associations you can download a .reg file from my site:-
Instructions for use:-
Download the .reg file bellow.
http://www.networkdelta.net/files/winxp_exe_fix.reg
NOTE: you may find that you are unable to open regedit.exe due to the nature of this problem in which case follow these steps:-
1> press CTRL + ALT + DEL and open task manager.
2> Under the 'Applications' tab click 'New Task'
3> Type 'REGEDIT.EXE' in the box and hit return.
this should open Regedit.exe then just import the 'winxp_exe_fix.reg' file into you registry.
Hopefully this should sort things out without having to re-install windows!
Hope it's of use to someone.
TurboSquid
I switched to Linux a while back it's great and it works! Unfortunately last week i had to use my girlfriends Windows XP machine while doing so i was being constantly pestered by an 'information balloon' informing me that windows had downloaded some 'Updates' and that it needs to restart, firstly i ignored this but it just wouldn't give me a break so i ended up saving my work and restarting the damn thing.
It restarted i logged in went to open Deepburner (a free cd burning tool) and up popped 'Adobe Acrobat'! At first i thought i had made a mistake and clicked on the wrong icon so i did it again and Acrobat appeared! I then tried MS Word and again acrobat openned!! Very odd i thought so i tried going directly to the exe file
example :- c:/program files/deepburner/deepburner.exe
and executing it from there, but again i just got Adobe Acrobat! I eventually figured out Acrobat was not being directly executed as such it was trying to load the deepburner.exe file, this pointed me to the file associations.
In checking the file associations i found that for some reason .EXE was not listed at all.
To fix .EXE file associations you can download a .reg file from my site:-
Instructions for use:-
Download the .reg file bellow.
http://www.networkdelta.net/files/winxp_exe_fix.reg
NOTE: you may find that you are unable to open regedit.exe due to the nature of this problem in which case follow these steps:-
1> press CTRL + ALT + DEL and open task manager.
2> Under the 'Applications' tab click 'New Task'
3> Type 'REGEDIT.EXE' in the box and hit return.
this should open Regedit.exe then just import the 'winxp_exe_fix.reg' file into you registry.
Hopefully this should sort things out without having to re-install windows!
Hope it's of use to someone.
TurboSquid
