Why Microsoft allows you to change all .lnk files to be associated with Notepad in Windows 2008 (or any other OS for that matter) I'll never know. Obviously that is going to royally mess things up. It's easy to do also because I just did it - I actually couldn't see I was opening a .lnk file because it had a really long path and in Windows 2008 the interface is funky (don't really like it). I right clicked and chose to open with Notepad. I guess the box was automatically checked to open all files of that sort with Notepad (I didn't check it).
Great. Now all my icons on the whole system show Notepad. When I clicked on any short cut it opened the short cut file in Notepad and displayed gibberish instead of opening the related program. So I thought ok, I'll just go into file associations and restore to default. Nope. Not so simple. There's no option to unassociate the file or restore to default (that I saw at first glance).
Sheesh.
So I just guessed that this might be in the registry and because I live my life on the edge, I searched for the .lnk file association and found it. Actually don't live that dangerously because I compared the settings to another machine that was working and determined that I needed to delete the "OpenWithList" node. Then log out and log back in.
Ouilla.
