I just happened to bump into this superb anti virus software called Avira Antiv and was checking out the reviews. I got to know that its one of the best anti virus software available for free. Wow! yeah! FREE!!!! I have Norton Antivirus, McAfee, Spyware Doctor running on my laptop. So, I didn’t feel like installing on my laptop, but then the reviews on Avira hiked my curiosity and so I installed and ran. Its fast and yeah! it detected like 80 trojans on my laptop that other antivirus software couldn’t detect. Wow! that was something.. I was thrilled.. stoked. So, I started cleaning the C drive and for my bad luck i deleted some system files which were affected. As soon as i realized that I am going to have some issues, I started checking out if everything is working fine or not. I found that i couldn’t open any of my drives by double clicking. I had come across this situation before, but then I was able to open it by right clicking on drives and selecting the “open” from the pop up menu. In this case, that also didn’t help. It kept asking me to select the program to chose from for opening the drive. That’s crazy. You can’t use any application to open up the drive. Well, I know that I have messed up the autorun files and the only way to open the drives is by typing the drive letter in the address bar or on run prompt.
Note: In some situation especially when anti-virus program has cleaned, healed, disinfected or removed a worm, trojan horse or virus from a computer, it may throw some errors like not able to double click and open the drives. This problem occurs in hard disk drive, portable hard disk drive or USB flash drive, and Windows will prompt a dialog box with the following message (message is optional though since i didnt get this message every time i messed up some file).
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Windows Script Host
Can not find script file autorun.vbs.
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Sometimes you will be asked to debug the VBScript with error code of 800A041F – Unexpected “Next” or or
“Choose the program you want to use to open this file with:”
Also, you will notice that the option below this message “Always use the selected program to open this kind of file” is grayed out.
This symptom occurs when autorun.vbs is created by trojan horse or virus. The virus normally loads autorun.inf file to root folder of all hard drive or USB drive, and then execute autorun.bat file which contains script to apply and merge autorun.reg into the registry, with possible changes to the following registry key to ensure that virus is loaded when system starts:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindows NTCurrentVersionWinlogon]
Userinit=userinit.exe,autorun.exe
Finally, autorun.bat will call wscript.exe to run autorun.vbs.
When antivirus or security software detected the autorun.vbs file as infected, the file will be deleted or removed or quarantined and so you get this error when double clicking the drive.
To correct and fix this error, you can check out the following steps:
1. Run Task Manager (Ctrl+Alt+Del or right click on Taskbar)
2. Stop wscript.exe process if available by highlighting the process name and clicking End Process.
3. Then terminate explorer.exe process.
4. In the Task Manager, click on File -> New Task (Run). Type “cmd” (without quotes) into the Open text box and click OK.
Type the following command one by one followed by hitting Enter key:
del c:autorun.* /f /s /q /a
del d:autorun.* /f /s /q /a
del e:autorun.* /f /s /q /a
c, d, e each represents drive letters on Windows system. If there are more drives or partitions available, continue the same command by altering the drive letters. Note that you must also clean the autorun files from USB flash drive or portable hard disk as the external drive may also be infected.
5. In Task Manager, click on File -> New Task (Run). Type “regedit” (without quotes) into the Open text box and click OK.
Navigate to the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindows NTCurrentVersionWinlogon
Check this name and data value for Userinit is as follows: C:WINDOWSsystem32userinit.exe,
Note: comma at the end of the data value is mandatory. If the value is incorrent, modify it to the above and you are done. You can get back your explorer now by clicking on New Task (Run) at the Task manager and typing in explorer.exe. Now, you can double click and test if the drives are opening. I am 99.9% sure that this will fix the issue.