A friend was having trouble with her laptop not being able to run .exe files.
I had to go through a few checks to see exactly what the issue was. First I had her right click an executable file and see what general tab says for type of file. Everything checked out fine in there. Said “exe”
file type exe
Now mind you, she doesn’t care much for computers but had a few things she wanted to do. So it was hard doing this over the phone.
She couldn’t open email or run a browser.
The trick was to change her registry
reg edit for .exe association
but again, she can’t run .exe files, and making a copy of her regedit.exe and renaming it to regedit.com didn’t work either. Seems that has stopped working on windows 7.
So, the solution was, to .reg file for her and email it to her so she can save the file on a thumb drive from another computer and then run the file her computer
she couldn’t copy it to notepad or create it in notepad, simply because she had no way of running the notepad.exe file. Don’t ask me why or how explorer.exe was functioning. Because I just do not know.
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.exe]
@=”exefile”
“Content Type”=”application/x-msdownload”[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.exe\PersistentHandler]
@=”{098f2470-bae0-11cd-b579-08002b30bfeb}”
Now the trick is, copy the text in the code box there paste it into notepad, save the file as “fixit.reg”, make sure it does not save with txt on the end. Then save it to a usb stick,thumb drive, memory stick, cd what ever you have to sneaker mail (hand deliver the file) the file to the computer with the issue. When the drive opens, just double click and say yes to everything.
I did do a search on the internet to see if there was another way. Everyone’s advice said to open regedit.exe on the computer with the problem. erm…… Nope. will not open .exe files.
Now I am not saying this is for everyone. She was on windows 7, and I am on windows 7 . She is using a laptop, I am using a pc. This worked for her, I might not work for you. I myself would go ahead and try it if it was the last logical solution or if I felt comfortable with what I have seen the reg commands. It just tells the computer that an exefile is exe. Pretty simple. So use that at your own risk. There is a chance that this will not work with your computer. This is not for anyone who is not on windows 7. This is for some (probably not all) windows 7 computers only. But.. .. since this post I have tried this Method on a windows XP computer that couldn’t open .exe files, and this Registry Edit did work. Here is the reg fix for Xp
Looks like the exact same set of commands.