Desktop icons turned into notepads

Hi Folks, As crazy as it sounds, that's what happened while I was doing a variety of installs of addons for my Microsoft Flight Simulator FSX program. At some point I noticed that all of my desktop icons had lost their individual picture (graphics) and instead all of them had the Notepad graphic symbol. When I clicked any icon it opened up a Notepad page with some recognizable words as well as other letters and characters (gibberish). Then when I tried to click on other programs in "All Programs", the same thing happened. I tried safe mode and it was the same there. I called for tech help and was told it probably was a virus. I then did a total System Recovery back to Factory Settings.

Needless to say, I'm interested in what may have caused this and to find out if it really was a virus. My computer is 1 month old.

Thanks for your help Howard

Hi Golden - thanks for the quick reply!

The few words I noticed seemed to be reasonable words for the particular icons (Microsoft, Windows, Flight etc.) Anti Virus/Malware software is Norton Internet Security and is updated automatically.

Cheers Howard

Thanks Milton - I'll keep this info for the future. Let me say that I'm very happy to have had the quick response to my questions here by you and Golden. Appreciate it and hope I'll be able to add to the site as my experience with Windows 7 grows.

regards Howard

Rightclick one of the offending desktop icons, choose Open With and associate it with the correct program which should be opening it. If you tick the box to have it do the same for all related program icons, it may solve your problem outright.

For best performance, I would migrate to free MS security Essentials or Avast 5 with the Win7 firewall.

Hi Folks, I fixed the problem by doing a System Recovery on my operating system. Not elegant but it's ok now.

Question for JDobbsy1987: Do you know why this happend at work? I'd be interested in knowing a bit more about it.

Thanks Howard

I tried a ll of the options give here but ultimately found a very simple fix for the problem here: Change which programs Windows uses by default
All you need to do is go in and re-associate which program you want to use with a particular file type (.doc, .docx, etc). It id the trick!