Cannot open or launch program exe or com files

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Some Trojans or Worms can actually disable your computers ability to start programs up. When  you click on a shortcut to a file on your desktop, or trying to launch a program file directly you might find that your computer cannot find the appropriate program or association to launch the file. This is due to shell\open\command registry corruption and may require you to reset some registry keys. Unfortunately sometimes you cannot even launch regedit.exe to fix this problem due to the inability to launch exes. The last time this happened to one of my clients I had to boot into safe mode, open up start > run > regedit.exe. It will ask you to select the program or file associated with this. I pointed to regedit.exe as the application to be used to launch regedit and that allowed me to open it. I was then able to restore shell\open\command registry keys with this file. http://filext.com/WinXP_EXE_Fix.reg You might want to take a look at these other resources in case you need to recover any other file types. http://www.dougknox.com/xp/file_assoc.htm http://www.symantec.com/security_response/writeup.jsp?docid=2004-050614-0532-99 After you recover, you will want to run a security scan with one of the latest security scanners.