Windows XP - File Types and Icons

Let me preface by stating that I feel sort of lame for having to ask questions about operating Windows XP, but, here goes...

I have an administrator account on the machine (XP Pro SP1, btw) and just created a new account for someone else in the plain old Users group. I have two irksome things I need to change, but can't seem to.
1) In my account the app associated with the "mp3" extension is Windows Media Player as it should be. In the new user's account the associated app is MusicMedia Jukebox (or whatever it's called) as it was when I originally bought the computer. In the user's account I cannot modify anything in the "file types" box (all buttons are greyed), so any time an mp3 is double-clicked a message just yells that it can't find jukebox any place (because I uninstalled it eons ago).
2) For some reason, after creating the new account all the icons of Microsoft Office documents change to one of the plain old default icons on both of the accounts and there doesn't appear to be a way in XP (as there is in prior OS's) to select an icon for a given extension.

Any enlightenment will be very greatly appreciated. Please don't be greedy and share your two cents. Thanks.

You may need to make that user an administrator (even temporarily) to make those changes. If nothing else, you could upgrade to SP2 and hopefully it would recognize that you deleted MMJ.

As for the second question, I too found this to be a pain of XP, and have yet to figure out how to rectify the situation.

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Originally Posted by ober

You may need to make that user an administrator (even temporarily) to make those changes. If nothing else, you could upgrade to SP2 and hopefully it would recognize that you deleted MMJ.

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That's what I was figuring I'd do as a last resort, but I imagined there must be some way to access another account except as administrator (as in a *nix OS) to make such changes.

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Originally Posted by ober

As for the second question, I too found this to be a pain of XP, and have yet to figure out how to rectify the situation.

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What a pain in the buns.

Dont know if I'm missing anything

1. Right click file->Open With->Choose Program->Click "Always Select..."->Browse for the prog you want to use

2. If you follow the same procedure to open the documents in the right version of office and click "Always Select..." it should adopt the new icons

That's how it always has operated anyway...maybe things have changed

Thanks for the suggestion, Fordy, but there is no "Open with..." on context menus in the account in question (possibly an OS flag to be set some place?). However, I did just solve the file association problem when I realized that in the right-click/properties dialog there lies a "Change" button that simply allows uneducated users to select a diff't app to associate with a file. Problem 1 solved.

I also tried to use that same feature to select Wordpad to associate with .doc and all the icons changed to Wordpad icons. Yay, right? Nope. When I changed the association back to Word the icons went back to the weird-plain default icon (see attached). This is really becoming an annoyance...

that's a bug with office. Has been since office 2000 (or earlier). Repairing the install is the only thing that's ever worked for me.

Really? What a pane in the glass. It's very odd because all the MS Office icons were fine until the other day when I created that new account... That's Microsoft for ya'. Go figure.

well i'll give them a little credit because there were some SERIOUS problems with office 2000 on multiuser machines (nt/2000/xp) which were resolved since then. When using office 2000 on 2000 pro machines in a domain, anyone who logs onto the machine will have to reinstall office...for each user. Luckily where I work there's only a couple of machines that multiple people use, but it's just a pain to fix when it breaks...that and if they're not listed as administrators on the local machine, the install will mean nothing the next time the machine is rebooted.