New to this forum. Can anyone help? Went to my computer the other day, (XP home edition) and found that most all my pictures in almost every file had a JPEG icon and I can't open any of them. Picture Viewer (preview not available). Explorer, (a small red X). Paint or any of the other picture editing programs I have, (error in opening file). I have tried everything but the right thing. After checking out various forums late last night, I found people with similar problems but no one seemed to have an answer. I found one post saying that In May of 2008 there was a security update (KB 945432) and apparently when that security update was removed, it corrected the problem. I think it was an update for Outlook 2003. I use Outlook Express. My problem is that I never downloaded that particular security update so it is not in the list in my add or remove programs. I've checked all the file associations and folder options on my computer and everything seems to be in order. If anyone has heard of this problem and knows the fix, please let me know. I have about a thousand pictures that I canot open. I even tried e-mailing them to myself and they still won't open. Oh yes, I've also scanned for worms, viruses and Trojans with three different programs including a live Windows scan from Microsoft that took two hours. Clean as a whistle and everything else is running fine. I think Microsoft did this with one of their updates and just won't admit it. Conspiracy I think. Thanks for taking the time to read this. What's with all the advertising links in the text? Very irritating.

@ klubdoc,
The advertising links in the the text is for Rich to make a bit of money so he can afford to keep the site going, which in turn, enables you to get help here for free. Everyone's a winner

When did the problem with your pictures start? Seems extremely unlikely that an update from May 08 would be causing issues in Aug 09 especially as you don't use the Outlook.
Had you made any major hardware or software changed prior to this issue?

About the advertisements......... understood. As far as any hardware, now that I think about it I did install a new printer about a month ago or so. That's pretty close to about when it started, or at least when I noticed it. As far as software goes, I upgraded to Windows media player 11 but have since gone back to the old version to see if that made any difference. It didn't. I also upgraded to the latest Internet Explorer which I've also gone back to the old version. That didn't help either. I have also installed "emusic" where I have been getting MP3s for my portable player. It uses Windows media player so there was no additional player installed. I never really thought about the printer until you mentioned it, so I'm going to uninstall it and see what happens. I just ran a registry cleaner and didn't find any problems except for a couple duplicate entries which I have deleted. This is driving me crazy. After I click the send button I'm going to uninstall the printer and see what happens. Thanks for the comeback. Still trying things.

Be sure to uninstall the driver for the printer as opposed to just the software.
You can do that through device manager.

Welcome to mintywhite btw

No luck. Exactly the same as it was. Uninstalled the printer software and the drivers through the device manager and everything is the same. I also noticed that a couple of my video files won't play anymore. They say they may be corrupt. I can't believe 90% of my picture files are corrupt. Some of the GIF files won't open either. Here's one of the pages from the web I was looking at last night. Sounds like exactly the same symptoms. I found some answers, so they say, but they are pay sites and I hate to pay without knowing if there is really an answer there. I still have some hair left so I'm going to keep looking.

Sorry about that. Here is the link I was referring to;

http://www.tech-archive.net/Archive/Out ... 00435.html

That thread seems to be irrelevant to me. You didn't install the update KB945432 or use outlook so how can that be the issue?
If i were you i'd use a data recovery tool to extract the pictures to an external device (USB Flash, external HDD) and try them on a different PC.
Testdisk is the best, but not very user friendly.

P.S Never pay for any answers to questions you may have. There's enough excellent websites out there that will help for free. With enough persistence you can solve almost anything all for gratis

Irrelevant maybe, but both problems must have something in common. Whether you get hit in the head with a baseball bat or a brick, you pretty much get the same result. Since my computer is set to receive Microsoft updates automatically, I still suspect that one of those updates may be the culprit. Thank you for your time today. I have other issues to attend to and will get back to this problem later. PS ever use NaturallySpeaking? Neat program for those of us who hunt and peck.

Hi

try
Click Start>Run and copy & paste or type in:
regsvr32 /i shimgvw.dll
Click OK.

deactivate:
regsvr32 /u shimgvw.dll

activate:
regsvr32 shimgvw.dll