First off, an apology- I’m regrettably computer illiterate, I can normally follow instructions, but I’ve never managed to sustain interest long enough to work out more than the basics on my computer- I get all headachey and have to go outside if I try. Sorry. Then I have the cheek to hope other people can tell me how to fix things when they go wrong.
I run AVG free virus checker- which a while back came up on full alert (after following a link to a news report on this forum, as it happens) with lots of error messages saying it had caught and isolated a virus, but not to worry my pretty little head, 'cos it had sorted it all out for me. I sort of went ‘uhh, okay’ and basically carried on with what I was doing. All seemed okay, it looked like the antivirus had done what it’s supposed to… until I tried to open a program. Any program. If I do, the ‘Open With’ box comes up.
After a bit of messing and general confusion, I realised that if I told it to use the program I wanted to open in order to open said program, it cheerfully did so. It will let me ‘look online’ with firefox in order to work out how to open firefox.exe
Apart from that, everything seems normal- scans are running as normal, and not picking up anything interesting, but nothing will start automatically (I manually open the virus checker before going online, which still seems to be updating and scanning normally), and I have to go through this silly routine in order to open anything.
My laptop’s infected with Vista, by the way. It came like that, and I clearly am sufficiently clueless and pathetic in my normal use to leave it like that.
Malware has been using this trick so it runs whenever you try to run any program. I still can’t figure out why Microsoft thought the .exe would be run by any other program but the default.
One other trick is to rename “program.exe” to “program.com.” It will then run.
If you click Start, you can type the command into the search box. (Vista doesn’t have an explicit Run command by default but you can add it if you want.)
For some reason the Run command was removed from the Vista start menu. I have no idea why. It’s just a default setting - you can put it back:
Right click a blank part of the taskbar and choose ‘Properties’
Select the Start Menu tab and then choose ‘Customize’
Then scroll down the resulting list until you see the ‘Run Command’ option and check it.
I would think the solution should work in Vista. If the registry keys shown in the kb article aren’t there, do nothing and let us know.
