This issue is something I’ve only seen when a program or virus managed to corrupt the .exe association in registry causing the user unable to run any programs.
If you have solved this issue on XP the items a bit different on Vista and Windows 7. It turns out to be a corrupted .exe association and the reason those steps I taken didn’t work is because the Windows Vista registry location for exe association is different from XP. Obviously using the XP fix cannot work on Vista!
When you have a corrupted exe association, you definitely cannot use any registry editor to fix it because it is impossible to run it in the first place. So here are a few methods you can try:
1. Open the command prompt. Make sure to run it as “Administrator”. Run command prompt and type assoc.exe=exefile (If you get access denied error, try step 2). If you want to run a file as administrator right click a shortcut to the program and select “Run as Administrator”. This will normally fix the corrupt exe
2. Download this file called “
Vista-7-fixexe.txt and rename it to “Vista-7-fixexe.reg”. Some security software will not let you download registry files. If you open the file it’s contents should look like this:
3. Open command prompt and type the following command REG IMPORT vista-7-fixexe.reg. Make sure you’ve already CD to the directory where the .reg file is. (If you have problems getting this to work, try step 4)
4. Download the
compiled version of the registry file above and run it.
5. Microsoft Fix It has an automated way to fixing the exe association problem. Simply download this
MicrosoftFixit50194.msi file and run it.