Repair Broken .EXE / .LNK Caused By Virus
This time i will show how to repair the broken link on your pc that have caused by virus.
If you see after Windows being booted up is a lot of popup windows with the error message “Windows cannot open this file: Adobe Acrobat Speed Launcher.lnk.
To open this file, Windows needs to know what program created it. Windows can go online to look it up automatically, or you can manually select from a list of programs on your computer.”
This error means that Windows couldn’t find the program where the shortcut is pointing to. Either the program has been deleted or there is something wrong with the association. I check Program Files and all programs are still there.
Immediately I know that the LNK file association is broken and the place to confirm this problem is the Registry. I go to Start, Run and type regedit, again I got the error popup window saying Windows cannot open this file: regedit.exe. I even tried to run regedit.exe directly from C:\Windows and also got the same error message.
Looks like .EXE association is broken too! Finally I found out that almost all file association can’t work. I can’t run anything from her laptop. So how do you fix a computer with broken association when you can’t run anything?
In short, all EXE files including CMD, Regedit, MSCONFIG are inoperative. LNK shortcuts also doesn’t work, which means desktop icons, quick launch icons, start menus all don’t work. Those nice icon images are no longer being displayed as you only get the standard unrecognized file type icon that look like the image below.
There are registry files that is able to fix .COM .LNK .EXE and other extension associations but the problem is if .REG association is also broken, you won’t be able to import the reg file to Windows registry.
The most important extension to fix is of course the .EXE extension. Once you have the .EXE extension fixed, you are able to run registry editor and other tools to start fixing other broken extensions. Here’s how to fix .EXE extension.
1. Press CTRL+SHIFT+ESC simultaneously and it will bring up Windows Task Manager
2. Click File menu and move the mouse cursor over to New Task (Run…)
3. Press and hold the CTRL button and click at the New Task (Run…)
4. Command prompt will appear.
5. Type assoc.exe=exefile and hit enter.
That would fix the EXE extension. You can now run any executable file.
Here is a list of other file extensions that you might want to restore.
Here is a list of other file extensions that you might want to restore.
After fixing the broken file association, the next thing I did was installed the FREE version of AVG anti-virus to scan and remove any existing virus. One thing you should know is Anti-Virus programs only good at removing virus from computer but it can’t restore the damage done by Virus.
Doug Knox’s Windows XP File Association Fixes page helped me a lot when I was trying to fix the broken association.
