So my Bro-in law has an issue that was only described to me over the phone. Basically when he clicks on the IE, or Firefox, or Chrome short cut he gets a message box that opens up and asks him what program he would like to use to run the file. If he right clicks on any one of the short cuts and chooses run as administrator the program will run just fine. The problem is only with his user account. Other accounts on the box seem to work without issue. At first I thought his file associations got messed up but he can run the programs as admin so maybe his user permission got jacked up. What do you think? I need a solution that I can give him over the phone.
I would try the file association fix first as it is quite common. http://www.winhelponline.com/blog/file-asso-fixes-for-windows-7/ I know you said he could run as admin but when Windows says what do you want to run this with it will usually be file association. I am not sure how Windows handles a run as, it must go and look at that users profile somewhere along the line (in this case the admin profile) and it may be that it uses that profiles file associations too.
I saw it recently after removing a virus/malware, can't remember if this was the same on past occasions. Has he had any infections recently?
A virus is the first thing I suspected. I’ll probably need to zap that before I correct anything else.
I know I always say this in these situations, but if things are screwed up this badly from malware, I'd back everything up, format, and reinstall windows. A fresh install isn't even that time consuming with Windows 7.
I agree with cmdrmonkey. At some point stop fixing and start reinstalling windows. I did it last week for someone. Somehow they didn't have any rights on their files and the pc was slow as hell. There wasn't a virus in sight. I was there for a day and came back another to reinstall the shit.
Yea, especially with W7, install times are very short and easy on modern systems, and most hardware is indentified by Windows anyway.
No... Screwed up badly? Windows lost a single file association. No... Why waste 2 hours on a rebuild when you can fix it in 2 minutes? No.... Stop joining in with the crowd. A rebuild should always be a last resort, why waste your time reinstalling the entire system when a 2 minute fix cleared this up? True I am a little bit more trigger happy these days now that all of my servers are run on ESX and its easy to blow them away but for simple issues I would never consider wasting a few hours of my time. If I took every PC away from a user at work for a complete reinstall every time they had a silly problem I wouldn't have time to do anything else. I have fixed this issue at least twice in the last few years and both systems are still going strong.
I reinstall mostly when its a problem thats uneasy to fix, especially if my whole system was infected. This i do cause ive got a fresh and new clear install, which allways gives a speedup. Its not just for the problem, the problem just triggers me to reinstall.
I reinstall windows whenever I shut down my PC. Keeps everything running as fast as it can be. Lovely jubbly.