Thank you very much, your short, quick tutorial was successful and got all my .exe's running again! :D all I had to do was run the exe.reg and it made my .exe's run did not need a system restart
when I open a .exe in windows 8.1, it says 'how do you want to open this file' and im not sure what I open the .exe with??!! if anyone could help that would be appreciated :)