Okay okay, so this is what's going on. I have a worm... I get rid of said worm and go through the procedures to clean up the worm. One of the tasks was to run the registry editor, go to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT and change the default for the value type of .exe to "%1" %*. now certain programs won't execute, which makes me think this screwed something up, but I can't remember the original default value type. I was wondering if someone knew it for WindowsME. Thanks! 