Cannot Open Certain Programs That Are On The Favorites Bar?

I have Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit, and I've recently run into a problem that I cannot really seem to find the solution for on here or on the Internet. (I realize this may take a while to read, but sorry, but I want to be sure to describe every detail of my problem that I can, if you would be kind enough to read this all I would be very grateful)I had recently built my own PC, and everything was running perfectly fine for a while, until a week ago, where after having downloaded music from a trusted music downloading program, Rhapsody, I had tried playing this music, but windows media player required me to restart my computer to play these music files for some odd reason. Well after the restart, I noticed that every installed program on my E: drive (Steam, Ventrilo, the many games I had installed on and not on Steam...) would prompt me with the "Do you want to open this file" warning, which is odd because I'm an administrator and UAC is turned off for me. These programs then, even if I opened the .exe in the folder that they were installed on, would not run, and no matter how I runned them (as admin, in compatibility mode), these programs would not work. On my Computer, I have Windows installed on an SSD(C: drive), and most of my games/programs on an HDD (E: ).I tried to re-install steam, ventrilo, etc. but this did not work because these programs said something along the lines of not being able to write/create a key. I thought the problem seemed to have stemmed towards some error in my registry, but in regedit everything seemed to say that I have full control on these files, so I did not believe it was some permissions/registry error.files (nor how to even start searching for this kind of problem!) and decided to reboot from a system image; no dice, that did not fix my problem either. The one thing I noticed, however, is that ONLY the programs on my E: drive didn't work. If I moved a program such as ventrilo to C:, it worked with no problems. Now I cannot move all my games and programs to my SSD, because it's only 128 GB and I own a LOT of games, and I did not want my 1TB HDD to go to waste, so as a last resort, I did a complete reformat of my HDD, and now everything worked perfectly fine, all my music, games, programs worked, I had no more problems, until today at least.For reasons that I deem unnecessary to go into, I needed to use Internet Explorer (I usually use chrome to browse the web) to open a .gif that I had saved to my HDD. For some reason, because I opened internet explorer, the same problem as before came back, but the only programs affected are the programs that I had put on the "favorites" tab in Windows Explorer! Every program not listed on this tab works, but the programs I had put on there (Steam, Chrome, Avast!) don't work now (or I get the same "do you want to open this file" security warning), even if they are installed on my C: drive; The same problems seem to have come back.But, oddly enough, when I open Chrome or Avast from the .exe in their installed folders, they work perfectly fine, if I run them as an administrator, they work perfectly fine, but if I try to open their shortcuts from the desktop or from the favorites tab, I get the "do you want to run this file" security warning. Steam, nor any of my games installed on or not on Steam don't work no matter where I try to open them, I've tried re-installing steam, but as before it now cannot "create a key" upon start-up. I also tried deleting these shortcuts off my desktop and off the favorites tab, but programs such as Steam and my Games will not run now.I am truly baffled to as to why this is happening to me again, every thing seems to have gone haywire all because I opened Internet Explorer to view a .gif. I tried to uninstall IE as well, but that still hasn't fixed anything.even if it is just identifying the problem that I have, I would be very grateful, as I do not want to have to reformat my entire HDD again, I want to try and get to the bottom of this problem because I have a bad feeling that these problems will reoccur again and again if I don't fix it.