So I got a new computer at work this week. It's a nice development machine that replaces the old loaner that I've been using for the first couple months on the job.
And I've already broken it.
: For some reason I decided that the easiest way to get the path that a shortcut (i.e. a .lnk file) points to was to open the shortcut in a text editor.
: Windows now assumes I always want to open all shortcuts in a text editor instead of doing whatever is appropriate for the file that the shortcut points to. That alone would be annoying, but possible to fix, and Windows can't be having that. So Windows decided that I also wanted to open all .exe files in a text editor, because there's no reason that I would ever want to actually execute an executable file.
We'll see if the IT guys can log in as Administrator and fix the registry keys. If not, at least I'll only lose one day of time spent setting up my new computer.