Link to home
Start Free TrialLog in
Avatar of Roger
RogerFlag for United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

asked on

global loss of file association of ms office (at least) in windows 7 ? post win7 antispyware con?

Hi,
Just had a nasty fright!
1. PC was sleeping, was roused, I clicked the link to MS Word (or Powerpoint etc) and got warning box: 'application not found'. Also when I looked in Window explorer, all my folders seemed empty of MS Office files.
1b: games and media player also failed to work, suggesting a global fault, not one limited to MS Office?
1c: something called Win7 AntiSpyWare started sending strident warnings abour virus infections ++.

2. Did a full anti-virus scan with McAfee - got 2 'minor' hits that were resolved automatically. Restarted pc.
3. Defect did not go away.
4. Started in safe mode - defect remained uncured.
5. Created new user name on same pc, so that second start button appeared on desktop.
6. When I opened the new user a/c Word opened ok; worked ok; and I could open existing word files. Conclude: problem avoided.

I conclude that I originally never 'lost' any files, but that they became unassociated with their respective application.

Question: how do I diagnose the fault in the original user account, and rectify it?
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
Avatar of Run5k
Run5k
Flag of United States of America image

Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
Avatar of Roger

ASKER

Many thanks for critical, rapid and effective advice.

Three files were found by Malwarebytes and deleted:
Hijack.Exefile (registry values); Hijacked.exefile; Hijack.startme (registry data items).

PC function returned to normal as soon it was re-started.

Very grateful!
Kelvin
Glad to help!