Killed XP in an interesting way

[brandondaly]

Hi,

I'm not sure what I've done but I seem to have done a good job of killing XP.

Most of the desktop icons no longer work, clicking on any of them brings up the "open with" dialog box, and none of them have icons. My computer has now become 'folder' and I have no programs in the start menu (through going through the documents and settings all the programs are still there). I also cannot launch any programs manually as clicking on any .exe file also produces the 'Open with' dialog.

The last thing I did was upgrade the AV and uninstall Virtual CD5.

Any ideas appreciated.

Regds,
Bran.

There are only 10 kinds of people in this world; Those who know binary and those who don't.

 

[bcastner]

You have malware of some sort. See if you can run at least two online antivirus scans, Trend Micro and Panda would be my choices:

http://www.mvps.org/sramesh2k/Scanners.htm

You may have to use the startup option 'Safe Mode with networking' to do so. Hit F8 early and often in order to see the boot option menu.

If you get no satisfaction from the online AV scans, a clean install is the only resolution I know of for this problem at the moment. A repair reinstallation will not sort the issue.

 

[Mike2287]

I had something like this happen once. I couldn't run anything so running a virus scan was out. Couldn't open IExplorer. Here is what I had to do.

Start a DOS session by clicking on START/PROGRAMS/DOS PROMPT, or click on START/RUN, type COMMAND and press ENTER. At the DOS prompt, make sure you're in the Windows directory, and type:
Copy REGEDIT.EXE REGEDIT.COM
Then Type Regedit.com in the DOS box and hit enter. This should open the Registry editor
Check out

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\exefile\shell\open\command. You'll see the entry:
(Default) = FileName.EXE "%1"%*
Change this to read: (Default) = "%1"%*
Do the same for the identical entry under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\CLASSES\exefile\shell\open\command.
Don’t forget to turn your system restore off.
You should be able to run your virus scan now and get into msconfig and remove suspicious things from your startup

 

[brandondaly]

Cheers, will give that ago when I finish work. Many thanks for the pointers.

 

[bcastner]

You can try resetting back to default the file associations for .lnk, .EXE etc. in XP:

http://www.dougknox.com/xp/tips/xp_easy_file.htm

 

[brandondaly]

Ok thats another one for me to try once I get to a dos prompt, there is no start/run as everything on program files has either gone (vanished) or doesn't work but I think I can slip command.com into the startup folder, if it won't fire up on its own.

Thanks, Bran.