Problems with an XP Machine

[Philip Ayres]

My Mother's win xp laptop has developed a new and "interesting" fault

There's 2 accounts on the machine, mine and hers.

Mine works fine.

Go in as her and when you try to click an executable to launch a program you get a message similar to "Windows cannot find a program to open this file with please choose from the list bellow"

I tried to circumvent the problem by creating a new account for her but that too had the same problem?

Any ideas for a solution that don't involve buying her a new laptop?

[Philip Ayres]

Think we're sorted: filext.com/faq/broken_exe_association.php

The problem is the error message is a legit one in most circumstances if it isn't an exe and the solutions involve registry changes that I was unwilling to make without recomendation.

[Dave]

This might help:
en.kioskea.net/forum/affich-110115-no-exe-program-will-run

There's a download link in the first comment.

EDIT: you hadn't posted when I started looking.

[Philip Ayres]

Advice from m'Learned colleagues:

I've got a WinXP machine here (not mine) that needs some treatment
User accounts refuse to load, machine hangs.
Machine won't shut down from start menu, hangs again.
When I try to boot in safe mode it bluescreens, gives me an error message and refuses to go any further.

Any ideas?

[Stomski]

Hard drive, memory or power supply failure.

Start with this...

www.memtest86.com/

Install on bootable USB key / CD and set the boot order in the BIOS appropriately.

[primenova]

I've been using my PC over the weekend & it doesn't like to load any email site apart from outlook. Blocks gmail & other site saying out of date cert's. But got IE8 running.

[Philip Ayres]

Browser? Firewall?

Any other sites affected?

[primenova]

I'm not too worried about it - I just use my PC for scanning anyway. I know there is the whole Microsoft don't support XP anymore issues. [the pop up says that anyway]