I am having this same problem. The address bar on the taskbar was working fine until this morning. Now every time I try to run an application (like notepad) it opens it in a browser (
http://notepad). If I type in the full path (c:\windows\notepad.exe) it runs fine. I have checked my system path in control panel, and it does include C:\windows. I have checked the address bar on other computers and they are working correctly. Also, if just go start->run and type notepad it opens correctly.
Any ideas?