why are these .exe files all going bad on my computer

I've just finished reinstalling windowsxp on my computer and now i've installed alot of programs and also i have a couple other programs on a separate harddrive and heres whats happining, all the .exe files show up as 3,000kb or whatever size it is and i try open it, nothing happens, then after a while the exe icon will turn to a mini window (a white square with blue borders) and when i hover my mouse over it the size is now 0kb and this happend to all the exe files on the seperate hard drive and alot on my main hd (thats running running windows) and the same thing happend on my laptop once, could it be a virus,spyware,trojan problem?

[ace]

That's windows for you.
But really, I have never heard of that problem lol :p Never happened to me or anyone I know. You said you installed programs, did you uninstall any? Or change the directory the program was originally in? I don't see how reinstalling windows could do that. My first guess would be that all those "exe's" your trying to use are pointing to the wrong directory, as in, all those icons are shortcuts to .exe's and the exe it was pointing to has been moved/deleted.
But then again, are those files your trying to use actual executables or are they shortcuts?

[Kanadier]

maby their just corrupt files? if not, just try going into either command prompt, or settings and mess around with the buttons a bit.

[ace]

maby their just corrupt files? if not, just try going into either command prompt, or settings and mess around with the buttons a bit.

For some reason I don't believe "mess around with the buttons" is a very plausible solution. lol. I don't think you can get random corrupt shortcuts out of no where unless the user had uninstall the program the shortcut points to. But hey, its windows were talking about, anything is possible. What would using the command prompt help accomplish?

Well...if you reinstalled windows, that would mean you would have had to reinstall the programs again. So if the programs that you reinstalled are doing this, then its probably something wrong with your operating system or you have a virus of some sort.

Did you wipe your drive completely clean before you reinstalled windows?
or did you leave everything on there and try to reinstall windows?

I'm pretty sure you need to wipe your drive completely clean before reinstalling windows, so if you didnt do that then that may be the source of your problem.

[Kanadier]

I don't really know, It works for me, but then again I learn best that way. It's how I learned html, Xhtml, javascript, c++, and all that jazz.

[DarkPacMan77]

The problem is that, with a new installation of windows, you must also reinstall the programs. That is the answer to this question, 100%.

-DarkPacMan77-

im not using the shortcuts but now there is this program (cant say what it is) that i was running today and i left my computer running and came back ,the program was minimized into the tray on the right side of the start bar and i put my mouse over it and it suddenly quit and i went into D:program files\****\ and the ****.exe looked just like those other icons and said 0KB so i dont think it has anything to do with reinstalling windows

[Kanadier]

sounds like the symptoms of a PC I just hacked, although you probably weren't, it's always a possability. try doing what DarkPacMan77 said, and if that doesn't work... well let's wait and see what happens.

sounds like the symptoms of a PC I just hacked, although you probably weren't, it's always a possability. try doing what DarkPacMan77 said, and if that doesn't work... well let's wait and see what happens.

[ace]

Proteus, please post something with more then smileys in it.

Well if you were already running the program and THEN it got corrupted, then reinstalling the program won't change a bit of difference(I could be wrong, but if I had to bet the farm on it, I would). I just suggest you to completely wipe the hd, and put a fresh install of windows on it. If it still has that problem then I'm guessing it's either the hd is bad, the data cable to the hd is bad, the IDE/SATA/SCSI controller on your motherboard is bad, or your RAM is bad. Lol, at least that's what I get from it. But I could be wrong.

diehard, how the heck did you learn C++ by running the command prompt? Do you know what the command prompt even is?