URGENT- Need help saving XP. Looking for system restores .exe location

[Vespidian]

Ok firstly sorry if this is in the wrong place or if I shouldn't have had caps in the title but I seem to have been hit by a very strange virus that has completely crippled my laptop. Effectively every single file or program on the computer (literally) has begun displaying the error message: windows cannot find the program to open this file, please select one from the list. I am able to run firefox because I know where to find the firefox directory and select the .exe to run it with ut anything even vaguely system related I have no idea what to do. I wold post a screenshot but paint is appantly an unrecognised file and i have no idea where to find its .exe. I have had a nasty virus a long time ago but solved it with system restore. However when system restore becomes an unrecogniseable file and I dont know where to find its .exe then this becomes a lttle difficult. Does anyone knowwhere I could find system restores .exe file as then i should hopefully be able to try to get this sorted. This has happened across the laptop for all users and safe mode does nothing. Any suggestions would be greatfully recieved (except those that suggest solutions involving using run as this is an unrecognised file type

 

[aford10]

Restart and boot into safe mode. Start-->run-->%SystemRoot%\system32\restore\rstrui.exe

 

[Vespidian]

Sorry I'm not entirely sure quite what your asking me to do, are you asking me to restart the pc and then somehow type in that command, or are you asking me to type that into run, it your asking me to type that into run then it wont work because run is unrecognised

 

[aford10]

You can't click on the run command in the start menu?

Boot into safe mode with networking. Download, install, and update malwarebytes. Do a full system scan. If you have malware, this should at least get rid of it. Then we can work on repairing the damage.
www.malwarebytes.org/

 

[graywolf]

Do you have Mcafee Security?

 

[Vespidian]

Ok it took 3 hours but malwarebytes scanned the system and removed 46 files which seems to have made all the programs run fine again. Icons for everything are still mucked up though displaying the general file not recognised icon. Anything I could do to fix this?

 

[aford10]

So, the icons work now, but look like this?


I'm not sure if there's a way to easily change them all. You can change them one by one in the file properties.

I would suggest using ccleaner to scan/clean your registry. Often after that many infections, there is some clutter in the registry that needs tidying up.
http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner

 

[graywolf]

How about repairing the icon cache with TweakUI?