Upon downloading a program, it asked me what I wanted to open it with, which I though was odd since it was it's own .exe file, so I chose steam to see what would happen. I look on my desktop, and all my .exe files have turned into sheets of paper with the steam logo on top, and whenever I try to open them, they open steam. I thought that my registry keys must be corrupted, so I typed "regedit.exe" and hit enter, steam pops up. I tryed "cmd.exe" and "command.exe", both opened steam. I've tryed numerous registry fixer-things, and none seem to work, and my option are narrowing down to a system restore which I really, really, don't want to do. Anybody have any bright ideas?
Hmm, I found something you could look through, go to control panel, "Default programmes" and then "Set Associations". Check through it and see if you can find the .exe and what it's set to. Edit: If this doesn't help theeeeeennnnn, hope your last system restore point was not too long ago.
Get another hard drive. Pile everything on that. Reinstall your OS and get everything back from the second hard drive. This should be a last resort though, do it if nothing els works.
google chrome, steam, winrar, cheat engine, video spirit, Itunes, dvd decrypter, bittorrent, synthesia, teamviewer, bejewled, Tales of pirates online, system programming, regedit, cmd, microsoft word, notepad, paint.net, anything to do with .exe, this is half, shall I go on?
Why don't you want to do a system restore? There couldn't possibly anything so important that you did within the last few days which was extremely important or couldn't be remade. Just do it, save yourself the time of trying to find a solution. And if it doesn't work, go with Gman's solution.
I assume, that you set Steam as the default program to open exe's You need to somehow manage to right click>Open With And then pick something.
http://www.winhelponline.com/articles/165/1/Restore-the-exe-file-association-in-Windows-Vista-after-incorrectly-associating-it-with-another-application.html You could try that but im not sure if it helps...
Forum > Other > Offtopic > Rockshell > Well this.... this is bad. but yes, i did system restorea and the icons stayed but it was fixed