yea that was definitely not the problem with me, but I did figure out how to fix my problem. If someone else is reading this thread, I had a problem opening pictures in the windows photo viewer as well as opening any of the games that came with windows 7 in the games explorer. I had upgraded Windows Vista 64 bit to Windows 7 Professional 64 bit on my hp touchsmart tx2 laptop, and i updated the graphics
driver, called Microsoft who advised to activate my copy of windows which i did, all that didn't work.
The problem seemed to be the updated
drivers for the ATI Radeon 3200 HD graphics card and with each update AMD and Microsoft failed to fix the problem. If you have this problem trying typing dxdiag into the Start menu and click on the Display tab and see if the Direct 3D acceleration is activated, because mine had been not available and I could not turn on the hardware acceleration from the control panel.
Thankful people much more acquainted with computers were able to solve this problem on another forum at
WPF 3D applications broken by Mobility Radeon 3200 ATI drivers from Windows Update on HP TX2 laptop
Basically the problem is with any program that requires running the WPF (windows presentation foundation) 3D and this can be easily fixed by doing either or (or both): updating the BIOS (Basic Input/Ouput System) by going to your computers support website (for hp that is support.hp.com) and finding the winflash softwaree for the latest BIOS for windows 7 operating system (for this computer it was F.12) or another and easier solution is disable the AMD External Event Service by typing services.msc in the Start Menu then right click on AMD External Event Service and in the drop down menu next to startup type and change it to Disabled and then click Stop, then click OK and close the window.
Hope this helps with all the other windows 7 users out there who were as frustrated as I was.
Also please feel free to post this in other forums so that the solution is easier to find.