The games in Vista, the solitair, freecell, etc....is anyone else having problems starting these up? Mine start up fine, but i've been trying to help a friend out today with his and we just can't get them to start up. It keeps coming up and saying it doesn't have a program associated with it.

To repro: Start - Games - in window that opens up click on a game.

But...if I drill down in the menu from Start - All Programs - Games, the games open up and run fine

No idea about a fix - but mine work just fine from the menu (Vista RTM). I just fired up FreeCell without any issues.

Yeah, mine work fine too (RTM here also, and his as well). thats whats driving me nuts about it. I'm beginning to think he might have done a few 'improvements' without remembering them. Everything else is fine tho.

check with process monitor,
launch from one shortcut and then launch from the other, see if anything differs on what it is opening or accessing

OK, found the difference.

The games in the menu its self in All Programs\Menu , the shortcuts normally look like this:

"%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Games\Solitaire\Solitaire.exe"

However, when the games menu is showing on the start menu its self (to the right of the pinned menu items under the user name - in the Aero theme) they use a different short cut located at "%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Games\", so for example Solitaire would be at:

"%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Games\Solitaire\Solitaire.exe" -mce

see the '-mce', thats for playing in Windows Media Center. Can't see anything in procmon because the WMC one never starts up.

Anyway, the difference is not the problem. Any of the native game links in the Ultimate version C:\Users\*****\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\GameExplorer folder will not start up. (the ***** is my user name so I *****'d it out)

Really odd. They start up fine on mine.

There are lots of bugs in Vista UI, one of them is the shortcuts.
For instance I create a shortcut on desktop by "right click\New\Shortcut" and insert a web adress. Then try to change the icon, pressing "change icon" and go to imageres.dll and pick one. Icon never appears. After one restart (sometimes) it appears but by just opening the shortcut one time, icon disappears again and goes back to the ie icon. (and sometimes unknown file format icon)

My start menu shortcut icons sometimes changes itself to "null"

OK, finally found the problem, I think. The issue was with MS Office 2007 and not with Vista. He had installed MS Office 2007, The company he works for is a MS Partner and he got one of the Office 2007 DVD's MS sent to his company. He selected to do a custom install when installing the Office 2007 and made some selections for something (still as of yet un-determined) for the install and this killed the links in the Games Explorer folder capability to start the game in MCE by removing the associations. Un-installed Office 2007, rebooted, and everything works correctly now.

Several installs and un-installs of Office 2007 later; Tried re-installing the Office 2007 to duplicate the issue, couldn't duplicate because we couldn't duplicate the exact settings he selected during the original custom install so removed it after the install. Did a second and third install with the Office 2007 and still no luck. However, on the fourth install managed to get the problem to re-occur but evidently I checked some combination of features during the install this time and can't remember exactly what I checked even tho I thought I was checking the same thing each time. Did six installs with just the typical settings (no custom selections) and problem doesn't happen, only happens with a custom install.

Oh well, will get back to it later, at least theres a likely suspect now as it seems its some sort of weird problem with Office 2007 - install it custom the problem happens, un-install it and the problem doesn't happen, install it typical and the problem doesn't happen.