I had Ad Aware SE installed on my PC up to around Februaury this year. Everything was going well until one day I turned on my compter and most icons on my desktop looked like the windows generic icon. Also, when I tried to open my .exe or .lnk files a message would come up saying there was no file association for the program.

Developer Provided Description - "If you are unable to run .exe, .bat, .com, .reg, .cmd, and so forth, you will want to download the following package which will assist in repairing the assocations. The package contains several versions of the same script. This is because you may have one or more working executable associations that you can use to launch the script. For instance: your .exe association isn't working, but for whatever reason, you are able to run .cmd scripts. There are .bat, .cmd, and .reg versions of the script. In the reg version folder, there are two ways to apply the assocations: apply them all at once by importing !ALL.reg, or individually, by applying separate\bat.reg, separate\cmd.reg, etc. If you are unable to import .reg files, or launch regedit.exe in order to import them, you will need to use the cmd or bat version. If you are unable to run either of those, there are a couple of tricks to get around it.

You can attempt to go into the aforementioned Safe mode with command prompt and run the .bat or .cmd from command prompt. Another way is to go to Start > Run (if Windows even works at all) and type 'cmd.exe' - - if Windows then asks you what you want to run cmd.exe with, then click browse and choose C:\ Windows\System32\cmd.exe, and it will open with itself. You should then be able to run any of the association resetters with ease."