.txt problems.. problem depends on various factors..

Well, this is going to sound like a very strange problem but maybe someone out there can help me out.

Recently my file association for the .txt has been acting strange (to put it midly). First off, the association was completely removed (I still don't know why or hot) and when I re-added it it created all sorts of new problems.

First problem: when you click on a .txt file in Internet Explorer it "downloads" it then opens it in notepad instead of just opening it with IE. This normally wouldn't be a problem except that some txt files (like Japanese) only work in the browser (notepad cannot display them correctly). The only solution I found to make it work right is to erase the .txt association again but then it opens up a new problem.

Second problem: The new problem is that when you right click and go to "NEW ->" the "text document" is no longer listed. (Also can be found if you go to "file -> new ->" in the Windows Explorer.) I've read that Tweak UI will let you add/remove templates and that's flakey and has not worked yet. Half the time it says "no application is associated with this document. Create an association by using explorer." when I try to recreate the txt document template and the other half it's already in there but is still not showing up. This CAN be fixed but it requires a lot of messing with the registry and as soon as I do problem #1 is re-created.

Basically it's just going in circles. For some reason I can't seem to have it the way it was before all of this mess started (again, I don't know what caused it). But since I know that something is messed up there -must- be a solution that'll fix it without having to reinstall Windows or use a system restore (I really don't want to lose all the files I may have received or created since all of this happend).

Since images sometimes speak louder than words, I've taken a screen shot of my current prediciment. As you can see, I have gotten the IE problem fixed but the new template problem is there. http://aniwheeler.keenspace.com/whereareyou.jpg

Thanks in advanced for any help or suggestions.


Oh yeah, I don't know if it matters or not..but I'm using Windows XP on a 1.6ghz P4, 384MB RAM.