GreenSmurf

Okay, I did figure it out, for anyone else who does something similar in the future. Although it definitely disassociated a lot more files than just the few I've figured out... http://filext.com/faq/broken_exe_association.php

Of course I do not... Would make it too easy. Not that it'll do be a lot of good now, but how do you set them in CCleaner? Apparently I can manually restore associations, and they stay when I reboot the computer. Weird. Although I haven't figured out how to do it for executable files (e.g. *.exe). Oddly enough, this did happen to my parent's computer about 15 years ago too--for no apparent reason .bat files didn't run when you double clicked them on Win95.

Dear forum, I never thought it would happen to be but... Since the last time I used CCleaner on my Dell running XP, now none of my file extensions are associated with programs. Including .reg (so I can't use the generic backup) and .exe so I can't even type regedit.exe into the "run" list. I've figured out a few workarounds and have gotten CCleaner to restored all of the .reg files made in the past month. Still same problem. I also may have deleted a key from CCleaner>>Tools>>StartUp>> I've turned on everything that's there, but if something's been deleted is there a good way to find out or get it back? And, if you have any other ideas as to what I might have done to create this particular problem, what would be your best guess as to what I did and how to fix it? I assure you, I'm usually (often? at least sometimes) not this dumb. Lesson learned--don't drink, get mad at your computer, and then try to take it out on it with CCleaner. Thanks