Hello there! Machine: Laptop Toshiba 2800 OS: guess RAM: 128 MB CPU: Pentium3 750MHz The above is the message I managed to get after a few tries to fix the main problem, which is: First, all the document icons in the WORD97 dialog for opening DOCs were replaced with the icon for My Workplace. First I thought it was just yet another glitch from WORD like the disappearing toolbar. THEN the big bang happened - gradually I lost all icons for the desktop shrtcuts and for the EXE files in Explorer, just the standard ones for "unrecognised" remained. The same happened to ALL the items in the Start menu. Right-clicking works, though. So: all EXEs are there, they just don't do anything - "invalid path and file type" And it seems to be JUST the EXE and LNK files. Ran Norton (with right-click) - nothing. ME starts up as usual, just without anything in the system tray and asks "where to dwonload?" for one of the programs in start-up. What now? I am desperate becase I need the machine for work!!!!!

When you get programs trying to open up with another program, right click the icon, go to open with, then choose the right program to open the file up. If that does not work, reformat your hard drive.

could try restore, start-run-accessories-system tools-system restore. and restore it to when it was working. thats what they say will fix it. and if needed you can run restore again and undo.

Virus(at least it acts just like a system we had at work,it definatly had a virus).Check this link out and see if its any help. http://www.computing.net/windows95/wwwboard/forum/45239.html later jimi

Hi Jimi! Sounded great, tried it -- nope! I managed to get things working a bit by renaming lost of EXEs into COMs, but the DLLs still don't get recognized. How do I downgrade to Win98? Format and just install from CD? Jürgen

you have a virus... see if this sounds familiar: http://www.pchell.com/virus/navidad.shtml if you got the exe's to execute by naming them to com... you have a virus. most likely a varient of Navidad worm or the SubSeven trojan. I'm not sure if you will be able to get a virus scanner to run within windows right now... if you have a virus scanner "boot disk" use it now to scan your machine. if not... go to a clean machine. download and install antivirus software from somewhere like: http://antivirus.cai.com make the scanner disk. come over to this machine and scan it from DOS.

newgrl, jimi, Many many thanks, your links were very enlightening, but... ...not navidad! Thanx again for the link newgrl, I am still waiting for my confirmation mail from CA - does this always take so long? Someone recommended Fix-It, which deleted 500 broken links, but didn't remove the virus either. So, I subscribed to X-drive, thinking about going back to Win98, but THAT confirmation mail is taking ages too! What is going on out there?