Rhinehart that is exactly the info I was looking for, jarfix fixed the problem. WinRAR was associated with .jar files. I could run the jar files by using java to launch it but it was looking in the wrong folders.
Thanks
I'm having the same problem. For some reason the launcher is looking in the Windows\System32 folder for the minecraft.jar and other info. My minecraft is in
C:\Users\[account]\AppData\Roaming\.minecraft
I am running Windows 7 Home Premium