Help, every time I use a program the "open up" menu pops up

Ok so something happened to me just a few minutes. First off let me say I am on Windows XP home edition with service pack 3. I have a gig of ram and a pentium 4 2.52 ghz processor.

I have the free program "AVG" as my anti virus software. Anyways about 20 minutes ago a message popped up saying there was a malware infection or something. I chose the option to remove it (the other option was allow).

Anyways, I did that and now the PC is acting weird. Whenever I click on a program it does not automatically open as usual. The "Open With" menu pops up and it gives you a chose of which program you want to use to open the specific thing you are clicking.

So if I want to open firefox I click it and then up pops the "open with" screen, I have to select "firefox" from the list of programs they give. There is a function that allows you to make it so the program always opens up with the specific one you choose, but for some reason it's not allowing me to select that option.

Another thing is when I went to the Control Panel and tried to click on certain things I get the pop up saying a "rundl32" file is not found in the windows/system 32 folder. Only thing is there is a file of that name in there.

So what has happened and how do I fix it? I tried to go do a system restore, but again it opened up with the "open with" menu and I have no idea where on the PC I have to go to locate the system restore exe or whatever there is. I'm sure it's in the Windows folder, but there are a lot of files there and I am used to just going to the start menu then to accessories and finally system tools to just select the option. Even when I click "windows update" it forces me to find whatever program I want to use to launch it.

So can anyone tell me what is wrong? I am afraid to restart the PC as I figure it might not work at all if I do that.

If you think that doing a system restore would work then can someone tell me which folder to find it in? As I said clicking on it from the "system tools" folder found in the start menu just opens up the same "Open With.." program.

One more thing, when I open up AVG my anti virus and I go to the "virus vault" where it quarantines viruses..there are 3 new ones in there. Under the "Severity" heading it lists them all as malware. Under virus names there is one that says "unknown" another that says "Win32:Primary-H" and "Win32:PowerRegScheduler".

So if anyone can help me fix this without having to completely reinstall windows it would be much appreciated.

Just wanted to get an update on the situation. Now for some reason when I click things like VLC media player..they open just fine. I'm confused..Also now when I go to the control panel I no longer get the "can't open application due to rundl32" msg and it opens fine.

Can anyone tell me what is up? I still have a windows security alert popping up because my automatic updates are off. Well, when I click to turn them on..it doesn't go away(despite the firewall and virus protection shown as "on").

The system restore is now working, do you think I should use it to restore a previous point?

Have you tried the EXE FIX for Windows XP that can be downloaded from here, after downloading it just double click on the registry file and it will solve this annoying issue. The problem might be because of some viruses that might have corrupted the file association in your system. After doing this, download malwarebytes and install it in your pc and scan your pc again for eradicate viruses if any of those exists - http://forums.techarena.in/tips-tweaks/1111999.htm