Solved Strange problem

[Aardvarkly]

Today I have been battling with a new problem and just wondered if anyone can shed any light on why it has been happening.
I have used LibreOffice in Windows 7 Pro for a few years now with reasonable results apart from it asking me to update and then when I try L/O fails and says something about a missing file. No big deal because it usually still works. This morning after booting up I notice that the icon for LibreOffice has gone and just a blank rectangle is left in it place. The only way to read my documents is to right click and open with WordPad. I decided I had better things to do with my day than beat my head against the wall so I figured I could just use WordPad to access all the LibreOffice stuff. Then I noticed that the icons for CCleaner and Opera browser had disappeared and were now replaced by the blank rectangle. Obviously trying to use Wordpad to open them wasn't going to work. They only way I could get CCleaner back was to uninstall it and reinstall from an old download I had used originally. Fair enough. Getting the Opera browser back was a lot more tricky. A reinstall wouldn't work. After poking around I found a right click option to search a "file path" and a few wild guesses and several pages deep along the trail I found a file that when clicked would open Opera at my home page and work properly from there. My next step was to go and retrace my steps and right click on that file and sent it as a shortcut to my desktop. Then I dragged the shortcut down to the bottom and pinned it there where the old one was.

My apologies if this all sounds a bit sketchy but I don't know any better way to explain it. My question is what has caused this? Why did LibreOffice suddenly decide to go tits up and why was it controlling my access to CCleaner and Opera?

 

[billmcct]

It seems you've lost file associations. Look in the tutorials above and Brink has tutorials and maybe *.reg files to fix that.
You should use HiBit uninstaller to uninstall LibreOffice. After reinstall it should fix all the LibreOffice file associations.

HiBit Uninstaller

Reinstalling the others Opera and whatever should fix the file associations.

 

[Aardvarkly]

Thankyou for the suggestions. Some odd things are still happening so I will look further into file associations.

Update:

Trying to sort this "minor" problem I have ventured a bit beyond my understanding so I will mark this as "solved" to avoid wasting anyone's time.