The file association is a common reason, but there is an issue with them on Windows 7. "Out of the box", the ASSOC command gives "Access is denied", even though the user is an Administrator.
When this happened to me, my first thought was to turn off the dreaded User Account Control settings, but that changed nothing. The eventual solution was to go into regedit and grant my user full control on registry key HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT, which is where the file associations are held.