Whenever i doubleclick to open my external harddisk or my mp3 player folder, a Open With thingie opens up. This only happens when i click on those. The Internal Harddisks are all fine. like C and D. Opening those does not create any problem, but it does for my external HardDisk and my Mp3 Player. Any advice on this?

Are these desktop icons/shortcuts you have made ?

no they're not. just the ones you find in "my computer"

And when you right click the mp3 player and then click 'open' what happens?

And what shows for 'type' in 'properties'?

when i rightclick it, it shows 2 lines of scribbles you know,.. the thing you get when you're computer can't read the language (click any of the two gets you back at open with) and type is just removable disk and local disk for my external

Here: http://windowsxp.mvps.org/

About halfway down the page 'Drive Association Fix for XP'

I got the referance from here: http://www.computing.net/windowsxp/wwwboard/forum/161697.html

nope.. didn't help

And you followed the threads and tried the command line fix?

http://www.computing.net/windowsxp/wwwboard/forum/161780.html

hi mate, i sort of fixed it thanks to your reference. what i did was i checked folder options. changed the settings to show both hidden and protected files. what i noticed that there was an autorun file. i opened it to see, and it showed the funny things i saw when i right clicked it. what also happened is that i was bugged. The Autorun file connected the drive to the virus. That's what activated my virusscanner to delete a file which i have not seen in my computer (i regularly check through the files). So i just deleted the autorun file and now it's running fine. Thanks for all the trouble mate

For anyone interested, there is a registry hack that also helps identiify and eliminate bad file associations:

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/excerpt/winxphacks_chap1/index1.html