Thank you - thank you - thank you! This worked for me, as well. I was installing YAWCAM and it asked me to install Java (newly built machine), so I did, then when I installed Yawcam again, when it should've started the program, instead it asked which program I wanted to use to open this type of file. It seemed strange, but I thought maybe it was asking me which software I wanted to associate the movies from the camera to play through, so I selected media player. POOF - all my exe files now try to open through media player AND all of the icons change to the media icon! Ugh!
I'm sure hoping I can just do a system restore rather than replacing them individually, but if not, its yet another time I'm grateful for being COMPLETELY ANAL retentive about keeping multiple clones of my system on disconnected drives. If you have any old drives (and if not, but one on ebay or something), and a hotswap bay, you'll never regret keeping period reclones... but I guess most of you already know this. Use free Macrium Reflect and you won't even have to shut down as it just does it in the background while you're doing other things.
Thanks again to the Tom's community for great people taking the time to help others find near lifesaving solutions. Its truly been a time saver, if not a life saver, for me!