error when opening 'services.msc'

Where do you get this text file? Do you mean accessing service.msc opens "notepad" with this text in it? Is it opening in something else (maybe even Internet Explorer)?

By the way, "that text" is services.msc itself. That's XML code and it is what services.msc is written in. Anyone using Windows XP can use Windows Explorer to move to their \Windows\System32\ folders, scroll down to services.msc, right-click on it and open it in Notepad. They see the same thing.

How exactly are you running services.msc? Are you going through Control Panel > Administrative Tools > and double-clicking on the "Services" icon? Or are you trying to open it another way?

Can you open Windows Explorer and take a look at services.msc as I've done in the image below? Is it's Type listed as a Microsoft Common Console Document still and is the icon an image of those two little wheels? (It is possible that the file association or default action for all MSC files has somehow been set to open in notepad, or something similar. I'm not sure how it would have gotten that way, but let's see if it is.)

 

Ah, that definitely looks like it's a file association problem. See this image from my system. (I'll also post details of the file association on mine, next post.)

 

Check and see if you can restore the proper file associations for the MSC filetype via: Control Panel > Folder Options applet > File Types tab > scroll to MSC type...

You may be able to use the Change... button and just select "Microsoft Management Console" from the recommended programs list. Otherwise, here is the output from using the Advanced button on my XP system...

Multiple frames of MSC file properties attached.

 

You'll need to go deeper in the Change dialog... Click "select program from a list" (you bring up an "open with" dialog box from there) and see if the program "Microsoft Management Console" can be found in the list. (That's the name right next to the Change... button in my image above.) If that is available in the list, select that and hit OK.

If not in the Open With list directly, then you'll need to "Browse..." for it. (Browse button is on bottom of Open With dialog screen.) Browse to c:\Windows\system32\ and select the program mmc.exe. OK it, and exit all the way out of the folder options and come back into it and see if this gives you new options in that first screen (from there you can check the associations like I have in the Advanced screen) or it may also change the Advanced button to "Restore". If so, click Restore.

The information in the rest of the image above are all the settings needed to rebuild the file association as needed to make MSC work again with mmc.exe as the associated program.

 

Here's a site that provides registry files for repairing file associations:

http://www.xs4all.nl/~laar2002/tweak/file-association-fixes.html

Scroll down on that page the the link that looks like this:

- MSC File Association Fix (Restore default associations for MSC files)

That link is a ZIP file containing a reg file you can merge into you registry to repair the MSC file type. (The reg file is also attach to the post as a .txt file.)