Help .lnk has terashed shortcuts

Hello thanks for reading this.

I have a flat-mate who's relying on me to save his pc.
He was doing something not to sure on his pc he had the right click (context menu) open on the desktop in Xp Pro sp2 (he's not on the i-net).

All his shortcuts are now .lnks and no longer work, whats worse is the whole machine also has issues now, opening control panel or any other sort of administrative applet now fails.

I think he may have used the "open this file" with this "type of file / extension" and not unchecked the box which says to always use this for all programs of this type..? Best as i can discern from his description of wwhat was happening at the time..it was an accident..the point moved just as he went to click on so,mething else in the menu..heard those stories before he was probably haveing a play around...:confusedrolleyes

However is there any way that this can be resolved i understand that these are link files how dows one reassociate the shortcuts with the proper apps and not have every shortcut with an extension of .lnk..System restores are no good tried a couple of these. :cry

If i reinstall windows will it return the .lnks to the proper shortcut.exe's?..the target is also a .lnk on the shortcuts.lnk executable..this is way better than any virus its as though Xp as got itself in a twist the whole unit is hardly more usable than a paper weight at this time.
Unfortunately not overly confident with the command line and have only done a few minor reghacks in the past. So hope none of these are required there must be a simple option to re-enable the correct file extensions or just remove the .lnk extensions??

Please help ge-eek at crisis with this one.

Thanks to all who read and can provide insite in this..he "flat mate" was driving me crazy over the long weekend we've just had.:cry

 

File association fixes
http://www.dougknox.com/xp/file_assoc.htm

 

Hi,

Thanks for the time and info 'Just Playin', will follow this up later (at work at the mo) and report how i get on..shesh flatmates can be annoying sometimes...especially when they have broken your old p.c that you've loaned to them...hopefully this will fix it.