Hi. I,m Stratomaster, 43 year old novice computer user. Actually I've been using computers since the good ol days of the Commodore 64.

My problem is when I open IE I get a message about "cannot find file blank.exe which is needed for opening files of type http" or something like that. I've seen a few posts here about registry problems but I'm a baby on stuff like that. Any help will be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Fender Stratocasters Rule

This is the exact wording of the message:

Windows cannot find blank.exe

This program is needed for opening files of type 'URL: Hyper Text Transfer Protocol'

Hope this helps

Hello Stratomaster and welcome to BC.

Download RegSrch.zip from here:

http://billsway.com/vbspage/vbsfiles/RegSrch.zip

Unzip it and then double-click on the regsrch.vbs file. When it runs it will prompt you for a string to search for. Enter blank.exe into that field and press enter.

It will run for a while silently and then create a report. Please paste the contents of that report into a reply to this topic.

*Note: If you have Norton script blocking installed, disable it or allow the script to run or this tool won't work!

Leurgy, here is the info you wanted:

REGEDIT4
; RegSrch.vbs © Bill James

; Registry search results for string "blank.exe" 1/11/06 5:55:53 PM

; NOTE: This file will be deleted when you close WordPad.
; You must manually save this file to a new location if you want to refer to it again later.
; (If you save the file with a .reg extension, you can use it to restore any Registry changes you make to these values.)


[HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Doc Find Spec MRU]
"b"="blank.exe"

Hope this helps and thanks for your time and trouble. A quick explanation of what is happening would be appreciated if you have the time.......Thanks, Stratomaster

Clapton, Page and Beck are Kings

It seems that your file association for opening web pages has been changed and then the program that was to now open them was removed, most likely by a program like Spybot or AdAware, or some other malware scanner. At least thats the theory.

Sorry for the delay in responding but I was consulting with our Hijack This people and they are extremely busy right now. If you could post a log they would be interested in seeing it.

In the short term you need to change your file association back to the default. What is your OS?

I received your PM with your log and I see some malware present. After our HiJack team have helped you remove the malware return here if this is still an issue.

The results of the RegSrch scan only indicate that there was a search done for the file blank.exe so that doesn't tell us much.