[Mr. Muddle]

Hi.

I am REALLY, REALLY confused about this one and would be extremely grateful for any advice anyone may be able to provide....

I have Windows Medial Player, Real One Player and Quicktime player on my pc. I have set Windows Medial Player as the default to open all file types, except of course those which are exclusive to the other two applications, e.g, .rm, .ra, etc.

There are some files on my pc which are driving me NUTS!!

They are audio files.
They have been downloaded from a variety of unrelated websites.
They are described as mp3's at all of the websites.
The name of the file (which appears under it's icon after it has been downloaded) has .mp3 at the end.
When the icon is right-clicked and 'Properties' is chosen, next to 'Type' it says 'MPEG Audio'.
Next to 'MS-DOS name' it says 'whatever it's called.MPG'

Even though I've set Windows Medial Player to open all files, the icons for the files are always those of Real Player.

Today I stumbled upon something very interesting, but also equally weird and frustrating! Up until now, I have used three different download managers to download these files, the one integrated with Netscape and two other third party programs. In each case, the results were as explained above.

HOWEVER, I decided to download one of these files in my old Real Download program, and lo and behold, the icon of the downloaded file was that of Windows Medial Player and both the extension at the end of the file name AND next to 'Type' stated Mp3!!!!

I then did a little test and downloaded the EXACT same file with my usual download manager and the file which was downloaded was back to the Real Player icon with three different types/extensions/names associated with it.

I am really sorry for this long post, but I feel like killing this idiot computer at the moment and wanted to make sure that I explained the problem as clearly as possible.

ANY IDEAS AT ALL???

Please help. Thank you!