[Solution] All your .LNK are belong to Firefox

[SYNACK]

Stupid problem #107: The great Firefox (insert application of your choice here) take over. Symptoms include all links suddenly becomming assosiated with an errant application (thanks Firefox) and no longer working as links. This is thankfully a per profile thing with limited users but fixing it involves cracking open their user registry hive and doing some fixing as there is no UI to manage it. Paste the code bit into notepad and run it as the user after giving them local admin rights (or just edit their hive manually) so that these are the only entries.

 

Fixit.reg

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts\.lnk]
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts\.lnk\OpenWithList]
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts\.lnk\OpenWithProgids]
"lnkfile"=hex(0):

 

As to the cause I think that users may have used the "Open with..." option on the right click menu and just picked a program. Either that or Firefox went off the rails again. Either way Windows should have prevented junk like this from happening.

[PiqueABoo]

Firefox merely being the most recent in a very long line of PITA file assocation grabbing apps.

One of the more useful things about GPPs I hadn't noticed but someone posted here a while ago is that you can use them to set (or reset) specific file associations for users.