[adorno]

Any help would be appreciated.

[Old Sarge]

Tell me more about the affected box - is it XP, Win2K, or Vista?

[Hegemony Cricket]

Have you tried a therapeutic restart? (power down, power up)

[Lucky9teen]

I would suggest a repair-reinstall of WinXP.

[Lucky9teen]

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896461

[Lucky9teen]

Actually never mind last post...try this:

http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000726.htm

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Hmm....You probably ought to give us some gory details,...speeds and feeds , newness of the computer....how do you connect to the WWW....do you have a router box...dialup ...etc...?

[ml/nj]

GoogleGroups "not a valid Win32 application"

ML/NJ

[TomGuy]

Have you tried to do a System Restore?

[reagan_fanatic]

I work on PC’s, and I’ve cleaned a lot of malware and viruses that produce messages similar to that one.

Make sure your virus definitions are up to date, and if you can, do a deep scan of your entire hard drive.

I recommend AVG anti-virus for protection.

[ShadowAce]

[Old Sarge]

[ken in texas]

I've seen the other responses... but my first inclination is to say "Stop Using the Computer".!!! If you can, take the hard drive out, hook it up to your other computer in some way, and save the data you have on the drive. If you can't do this, find a local computer geek that can do it. The first rule of thumb here is "Save Your Data", unless you already have complete backups.

Once that's done, you can try all manner of suggestions that have already been posted. If they work without removing your data, all is well, and you just wasted some time. If you trashed your data while fixing the problem, at least you can restore it.

[w1andsodidwe]

Found this, might be worth a try.

> When I try to execute ANY ( yes, any ) executable ( *.exe/*.msi etc) file,
> I
> receive the error msg “is not a valid Win32 application”. I am now at the
> point I can not add or update ANY software whatsoever due to this error
> coming up for any executable.

Back in my help desk days, I would often see this is a result of a virus
called “pretty park” or something like that. It modified the registry to
change the handler for .EXE files and Windows would throw the same error.

It’s a long shot, but check this key in your registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\exefile\shell\open\command

There should be two keys there, (Default) and Isolated Command as shown
below with the Type and Data If you have other stuff in the Data besides
“%1”
%*, then something has gotten into your PC.

Key Name: (Default)
Key Type: REG_SZ
Key Data: “%1” %*

Key Name: IsolatedCommand
Key Type: REG_SZ
Key Data: “%1” %*

[adorno]

By the way, people, sorry for the delayed response.

I was with my mother at the hospital where she was having her gall-bladder removed.

It’s only when I got back from the hospital that I got busy again on my computer problem

My last 2 replies, including this one, are from the “repaired” system.