missing file associations

OK...my son's karate instructor called me, 2nd time he's had this happen.

All of his file associations are missing and therefore he cannot launch any applications except Mozilla.....very weird. I was able to direct him to a couple of online scans for trojans and viruses by doing an end-around to get his IE working (needed activex for the online scans). The scans found a couple of trojans and 4 viruses, cleaned them up but the system is still screwed....I've been unable to get his files re-associated with applications (I hate trying to do crap like this over the phone).

Dell 2.4 P4
512 megs
60 gig
XP Home

The first time this happened Dell support had him reinstall Windows and offered him no explanation of what happened. I hate the thought of having him spend 2 hours on the phone with Dell almost as much as I hate the thought of going over and doing the reinstall myself. Any of you folks have any suggestions for old Al to try out before I take a sledgehammer to his box???

Hey Al,

I did some searching and I found this:

http://www.xs4all.nl/~laar2002/tweak...ion-fixes.html

It has some .bat files that restore most file associations (not 3rd party)

Hope this helps.

http://www.networkassociates.com/us/...rces/sv_02.htm
Was this one of the viruses that he found.
It seems to do what you want. I scanned it with panda but you may wanna scan again. It was the only thing I found.
http://www.dougknox.com/xp/tips/xp_easy_file.htm

Quote:

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Originally posted here by muert0
http://www.networkassociates.com/us/...rces/sv_02.htm
Was this one of the viruses that he found.
It seems to do what you want. I scanned it with panda but you may wanna scan again. It was the only thing I found.
http://www.dougknox.com/xp/tips/xp_easy_file.htm

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Veeeeerry interesting....After the virus scan Outlook account setup launched...a fact I should have mentioned in the original post. This could well be an "e-card virus" as mentioned in the first link you provided.

Hob...thnx for the bat file link, will probably end up using something along those lines to fix the damned thing. If anyone else has any other thoughts, by all means please continue to share.

What I would try doing is holding the shift key and then right click on the file you want to fix, then select "Open with" then select the correct file association for that program from the list, you may have to browse for it. and once you have found it make sure you have checked the Always use the selected program to open this kind of file box.