Help! File Type association problem!!

[Krazy_About_Technology]

Guys, please help. I am having a weired problem.

A friend of mine in my absence has done some mischiefs on my system. He ran a software for managing file associations. It was designed for Windows 98 and did serious problems with Vista.

Now every file type on my system has all its associations in its right click menu, i mean for example, .msi files have all the install, repair and uninstall options in their menu but the action that is default doesn't work. Windows shows error on double clicking or on right clicking and selecting the first action :

Windows cannot access the specified device, path or file. You may not have the appropriate permissions to access them.

I checked associations in the registry itself and they seems to be all right. I checked the permissions on both data files and the programs that open them. I had also tried to take the ownership of files, but that even that didn't help. I cant understand what to do. For many files, i resorted to using open with... but some files like the Windows Update files (.msu), i don't have any idea what programs they run with. I can tally that from registry but doing that for every file is cumbersome.

Please help.

[Kiran.dks]

Playing with file associations is dangerous mate. It is very cumbersome process to get set all the file associations. Try system restore option.

[Krazy_About_Technology]

Thats the problem yaar, disabled it in the starting. It wasnt such a big deal in XP as it is in Vista. Removal of old style File Association Editor from Folder options has created this problem. Maybe the new style is good for general users but what about power users?

Do anybody knows about any freeware tool that can be used to edit file type associations in the good old way?