To anyone who can help, I am not sure how this happened but I think it started when my fan on my power supply was making noise. I removed it and cleaned it. When I reinstalled it and rebooted I believe a window opened by Adwatch said a registry change was being attempted so I told it to block it. Then when Windows loaded(XP home) All the program icons on my desktop were changed to some sort of windows icon & all the file names foir these have an .lnk extension shown. Also none of the programs that normally load on start up will not load. The task bar is empty. If I try to load a program through my computer and click on an exe a window opens an says The file does not havea program associated with it for performing this action. Create an association in the folder options control panel. When I do this by adding a new file extension in the file types tab (EXE) and go to advanced and in associated file types put in Application it puts EXE in the extension & file types window. But as soon as I close folder options and open it EXE is gone. Also in start programs all the program files have .lnk extensions. I have managed to run Mcafee viruscan and Nortons antivirus but nothing comes up. I also tried to run regedit but this also won't run because it has a .exe extension. A note opens and says windows needs to know what program created it. Please any help with this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks,Tindrawer