Virus Guy pretended :
> FromTheRafters, while unnecessarily full-quoting, wrote:
>
>>>> Has there ever been a media file (mp3, avi, flac, etc) that could
>>>> accomplish that?
>
>>> Nope, not if a user has file types set.
>>>
>>> An exploit in widows can allow renaming a file extension from say
>>> .exe to .mov Or naming it with no extension at all.
>
>>> And windows was stupid enough to recognize it as an .exe despite
>>> the extension, and run it as such.
>>
>> Er, what is stupid is relying on the extension to mean anything.
>> Now, it is usually the actual format of the file that tells the
>> OS what it really is and how it should be handled.
>
> On my win-98 system, my default media player is VLC. Files that have
> extensions like mp3, avi, flac, (etc) show up in my file explorer as
> having VLC icons.
>
> I took calc.exe, copied it to somewhere else outside of c:\windows,
> renamed it to mp3, and it took on the VLC icon.

I took calc.exe and renamed it to the desktop as calc.mp3 and it kept
the calculator icon. It also invoked the calculator when
double-clicked. In properties it is listed as calc.mp3 as the
calculator executable. I *real* mp3 invokes media player and has the
media player icon.

I don't have any MP3's on this machine, so I used Hot-Text's offering
here (http://s-e.mynews.ath.cx:1361/test.mp3) to test with.

[...]

Another reason W98 sucks.