Win + E keyboard shortcut stopped working

Question

I've managed to mess up my Win + E shortcut, such that it gives me the following error message:

Is there any way to manually restore this shortcut?

I'm running Windows 7

Answer 1

What does WIN+E do?

Because troubleshooting System Internals is sweet...

Let's look on an untampered system with Process Monitor to see what exactly happens when we do that.

The steps I take:

1. Download and run the program: http://live.sysinternals.com/procmon.exe
2. Accept the EULA, reset the filters and filter anything away that's not interesting.
3. Clean the log, press WIN+E and stop capturing afterwards.

This leaves me with a bunch of events (as the folder is being opened, etc...), so we look at the first ones:

Note that we're only going to look at the SUCCES ones:

• HKCU? No, current user configuration, too big key.
• HKCU\Software\...\Explorer? No, explorer configuration, too big key.
• C:\Windows\? No, read because it is the working directory
• HKCU\Software\Classes? No, Windows classes, too big key, used to search the next one:
• HKCR\CLSID\{20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D}? No, renaming this has no effect.
• HKCR\Folder? BINGO!

Seems the contents of that key are way too specific regarding execution,
exploring that key, I would say opennewwindow would be the action WIN+E calls.

Just to verify it, let's adjust the value to Ivo Flipse.

Ouch, I just broke my computer... BINGO!

How do I solve the problem?

If Ivo Flipse his problem isn't further along the call stack...

Set

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\shell\opennewwindow\command\DelegateExecute

to the default value:

{11dbb47c-a525-400b-9e80-a54615a090c0}

You might want to check the other keys under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\shell\,
they should have the same value as above...

Answer 2

I'd assume most likely it is virus corrupting the .exe file association. I have recently come over a fix of it (By jared: http://jaredheinrichs.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/vista-7-fixexe.txt )

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[-HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts\.exe]

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts\.exe]

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts\.exe\OpenWithList]

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts\.exe\OpenWithProgids]
"exefile"=hex(0):

save the above as a text file with .reg extension. Then double-click it.