exe file type lost icons and can't be run by double clicking

[jpwanabe]

So last night I was trying to set up a Garry's Mod server for a friend. I was messing around with a bat file trying to get the correct launch settings, when suddenly all of the exe on my desktop lost their icons. At the time I thought nothing of it and just continued with what I was doing. About an hour later, when I was going to open Google Chrome to download a map, I found out it wasn't launching. All that what happened was a command prompt box would pop up for less than a second and close. I then tested all of the other exe. They all did this. Because this was during the middle of the day I could not restart the box due to our servers being filled.
This morning I restarted the box and found out that this is still occurring after a restart. I have no idea if this is a result of me messing with the bat file for the garrys mod server. I do not remember exactly what was on my command line when this occurred. As a extra note I can run some exe if I don't try to physically click. For example I can't run the task manager by right clicking the Start menu. But I can run it by sending the Control Alt Delete command. I don't know if that info helps.

this is what all of my exe icons look like right now.
http://puu.sh/g9ixD/8fc7abd08c.png

[kraze]

You can try closing explorer.exe via task manager then running "ie4uinit.exe -ClearIconCache". That will clear your icon cache and then regenerate it once you restart explorer.exe. Though, I wouldn't expect this to actually fix your programs from not running, that issue sounds more like a corrupted user profile.

Try running this tool from Microsoft to see if that fixes it.
http://support.microsoft.com/mats/syste ... dows/en-us

[jpwanabe]

I don't care about losing the icons as much as I care about not being able to run them. I will try that download as soon as I can. Unfortunately I had to leave to work since I had made the post. I will let you know how it turns out. If anyone else has any ideas that I could try when I get home too please feel free to post them. I'd rather not have to format the box and reset up 20 servers again.

[jpwanabe]

so I was able to run home on my break and download the program by using Windows Explorer to open Chrome by just putting the website address in it. unfortunately I can't run the exe for the same reason I'm having problems in the first place. I will try creating a secondary user and seeing if I can run it off of that profile. But if anyone else has any ideas please post them.