Exe renamed, resized, and fix didn't work

The virus put a VBS extention on every exe file on one of my drives. Every single program was suddenly 5KB and could not be executed. In the virus forum, I was given a link to a registry patch (

that fixed the file sizes. But the programs still could not run (brief cmd window which immediately closed when I'd try to run them).

I started from scratch and rebuilt the whole xp environment and had to delete every single exe file on the second drive and redownload a bunch of stuff.

Obviously, for future reference, I'd love to know why the programs, after restoring their attributes, were still unusable.

P.S. No idea what the virus was other than it added a .vbs extention to all the files. I forgot that malwarebytes was turned off :banghead

OS Name Microsoft Windows XP Professional
Version 5.1.2600 Service Pack 3 Build 2600
OS Manufacturer Microsoft Corporation
System Manufacturer Dell Inc.
System Model Latitude D830
System Type X86-based PC
Processor x86 Family 6 Model 15 Stepping 10 GenuineIntel ~2394 Mhz
BIOS Version/Date Dell Inc. A12, 5/20/2008
SMBIOS Version 2.4
Hardware Abstraction Layer Version = "5.1.2600.5512 (xpsp.080413-2111)"
Total Physical Memory 4,096.00 MB
Available Physical Memory 2.91 GB
Total Virtual Memory 2.00 GB
Available Virtual Memory 1.96 GB
Page File Space 3.34 GB