Exe's opening in windows media center

**Tyler** · 01-17-2010 11:43 PM

A friend of mine is having serious computer problems.
Any application that she tries to open, her computer tries to open it with Windows Media Center.
The computer that has this problem is not currently hooked up to the internet, so she's been downloading stuff off the web on another computer, and transferring it over. She thinks that it's a virus that she downloaded and infected this computer when she transferred the stuff over.
Whatever this thing is, it won't let her do a system restore, and she doesn't have the recovery disc, because Microsoft, in all their wisdom, didn't send her a disc with the computer. She has a ton of music and videos that she would hate to lose, is there a way to fix this without formatting the hard drive and reinstalling?

**Maria92** · 01-17-2010 11:58 PM

Can she right click and go "open with?" Hmm...this sounds bad. I imagine you could take it to a computer guru and they'll fix it. Failing that, would it be at all possible to copy all the music and video files to an external hard drive or jump drive?

**Tyler** · 01-18-2010 12:00 AM

She trying to run applications, not view pictures or listen to music.
There isn't an "Open with" option.

**Maria92** · 01-18-2010 12:03 AM

Yeah...so would it at all be possible to transfer her files over to another device so she could reformat the hard drive without losing anything she cares about?

**Tyler** · 01-18-2010 12:04 AM

Nope. Already thought of that.

**Maria92** · 01-18-2010 12:08 AM

Fucking hell...

...okay, do you know any good "hackers?" Real gurus who could fix the problem? Do you know what kind of antivirus/antimalware she's running? Can she open task manager and start killing tasks?

**Tyler** · 01-18-2010 12:23 AM

Originally Posted by Mario92

Fucking hell...

...okay, do you know any good "hackers?" Real gurus who could fix the problem? Do you know what kind of antivirus/antimalware she's running? Can she open task manager and start killing tasks?

Do you think I would've posted the problem here if I had hacker friends?
Some kind of antivirus that came with her computer. That free trial shit. But she can't run it, because her computer won't run any kind of application.
She doesn't see anything odd in the Applications or Processes tabs.

**Maria92** · 01-18-2010 12:44 AM

Hmm...well, that's not good. My next thought would be rootkit...in the end, you might have to Geeksquad it.

**MementoMori** · 01-18-2010 02:20 AM

ok, first she'll have to figure out what the virus is (if it is a virus and just not a bad setting)
She needs to open her process's and go here:http://www.processlibrary.com/ and have her check every process, she may need to write them down.

Then if she finds any virus, she needs to get spybot search and destroy, i've had a trojan before and "broke" it's programming so it was there but didn't do anything malicious then just used spybot to get rid of it. There are tut's on how to get rid of most virus's, just spend some time Google'ing for them.

Is this this Antivirus software she has?