Unable to access Hard Drive in "My Computer"

[inferno82]

Hi ya'll

I'm new to this place and i've been told that i could get help here

I have a really annoying problem and its driving me crazy.

Every time i double click my C: in My Computer a window pops up which says

"Choose the program you want to use to open this file with". Windows XP is not entering any of my hard drive. The problem is the same for my other drives E, F, G. My DVD rom is D:

I think that probably windows XP has lost file association of my hard drives.

I am able to access the contents of my hard drive if i manually type C: and press enter in the address bar. Same goes for my other hard drives. Similarly i can access my hard drive from Windows Explorer. It works fine there too. The only time the problem occurs is when i try to access C: E: F: G: from "My Computer". Another thing i noticed is that when i Right Click my hard drives in My Computer the menu does not show "Open" and "Open With" options. Instead they have been replaced by unreadable charecters which make no sense. It's not even chinese.

I have scanned my pc using different up to date antiviruses like Mcafee Antivirus 2007 plus and Bit defender. Infections were found and cleaned, clearly they did some damage before they were removed

Other than this my windows have been functioning normally since September of 2005.

Please Help !!!

 

[Nodsu]

You should do a thorough malware scan with more advanced tools. See our security forums for this.

All sorts of Explorer actions pertaining to drives can be found in registry under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Drive

Look around and delete any supicious entries there (be sure to make a backup of that first (select the Drive key, File->Export)). There should be nothing there in a clean system. Any legit entries should be self-explanatory like "WinRAR" or whatever.

 

[inferno82]

Hey

Thanks for the reply Nodsu. I did a complete scan of my pc as per your instructions. I "strictly" followed the steps mentioned in the malware, spyware and anitivirus removal instructions posted in the security thread of this forum.

Still no luck !!, absolutely nothing was found. all scans that i ran from various softwares listed in that thread returned 0 errors except for adware which found some infections which were successfully removed after the scanning was complete.

I accessed HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Drive in the system registry. I dont see any suspicious files there.

Clicking on the the contents of "Drive" shows a file in the right pane which says

(Default) REG_SZ (value not set)

the rest i think are system files. Can you be a little more specific what file should i be looking for ?

How can i restore my hard drive file associations, it's very annoying. my system is functioning properly except for this bug.

Thanks for your help, i appreciate it !!

 

[nquery]

i'm having the exact same problem!!!

https://www.techspot.com/vb/showthread.php?p=417855#post417855

unfortunately i haven't gotten a solution to it. it just happened, on a clean install!!! installed windows/office/AVG virus scanner, some knicknacks and boom, drives lose associations