Problem details:
A friend of mine was playing Osu!lazer and downloaded the most recent update, we played the game together for about half an hour and then exited the game. Upon exit my friend found that all his apps had the osu! logo instead of what they were supposed to be. He tried to open one of the affected apps and it opened osu!. He was not able to solve the issue through a restart and the app had even affected core processes like his settings and browsers. He ended up needing to system reset, wiping his ENTIRE SYSTEM of all downloads. I still don't know if that worked as he has not finished reinstalling things. THIS IS A SERIOUS ISSUE AS YOU COULD IMAGINE.

OSU IS A VIRUS.

Video or screenshot showing the problem:
The person affected could not even screenshot their device and I wasn't smart enough to take a picture through discord. But this is truly an issue and I will be telling everyone I know that Osu is infected with a virus until there is confirmation of this issue being fixed. This occurred on Osu!lazer if that's an important detail.

osu! version: Stable 20230206

Note: It is possible the version listed here by default is incorrect and I don't know the name of the version but it is the latest osu!lazer version. THIS IS NOT A JOKE.

Edit: I may sound like I'm overeacting a bit, I won't be telling people that osu is a virus and stuff like that. Also I'm assuming this is an osu problem and not external but I could be sorely mistaken, please be patient with me as you can imagine it's freaky to see your friends whole computer be taken over by a rythm game in seconds.


Edit 2: This seems to probably be a one off bug on the client side. Thanks for help on this issue, I'd say this is resolved but I don't know if I can do that from my end.

Did you download lazer directly from GitHub (https://github.com/ppy/osu/releases)? If so, this doesn't seem possible, nor have I seen anyone else report anything similar. Perhaps you already had a virus on your PC prior to download lazer that caused this.

Death wrote:

Did you download lazer directly from GitHub (https://github.com/ppy/osu/releases)? If so, this doesn't seem possible, nor have I seen anyone else report anything similar. Perhaps you already had a virus on your PC prior to download lazer that caused this.

Not sure where my friend downloaded it from, I did not have the same issue and I downloaded from home/download . I'll ask him where he downloaded lazer from and get back to you as soon as possible.


Thank you for the quick response.


Edit: He downloaded from home/download as well.

Is it possible osu!lazer became the default application for opening all .exe file extensions on his system, which might cause all icons to switch to the osu! icon? It's not too hard to accidentally set up an incorrect file extension association... Whether that would open osu!lazer itself I'm not sure.

LethalStarfish wrote:

Is it possible osu!lazer became the default application for opening all .exe file extensions on his system, which might cause all icons to switch to the osu! icon? It's not too hard to accidentally set up an incorrect file extension association... Whether that would open osu!lazer itself I'm not sure.

That sounds like it could be a credible answer, I'm not too knowledgeable about that stuff though. How would he accidently set that up all the sudden? (He has been using osu!lazer for at least over 4 months)

After a little testing, I wouldn't say it's easy to mess up the ".exe" file association. As far as I can see, Windows doesn't make it particularly easy to change the ".exe" file association, although, I have found a small number of examples when searching google: https://superuser.com/questions/427434/how-to-fix-exe-file-association-in-windows, https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/exe-file-association-not-working-anymore-as-a/82b03dea-6be1-4bb3-8060-3cb2bca0a030

File associations typically get messed up when you try to open a file that doesn't have a default program set, and then Windows prompts you to choose a program to open the file with, and asks whether you want it to always use that program for those file types or just once. You can also mess up file associations if you try to open a file that already has a default program with another program, and then accidentally choose to always open it with that program (ie opening a .docx file with notepad, and then choosing always open with notepad, resulting in all .docx icons changing to the default .txt icon and always opening in notepad).

It is still possible that this could be a bug in osu!lazer, but this could probably also be caused by some pc cleaning/repair tool or other programs.

Unfortunately there's not much to diagnose at this point if your friend has reset his system already.

LethalStarfish wrote:

After a little testing, I wouldn't say it's easy to mess up the ".exe" file association. As far as I can see, Windows doesn't make it particularly easy to change the ".exe" file association, although, I have found a small number of examples when searching google: https://superuser.com/questions/427434/how-to-fix-exe-file-association-in-windows, https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/exe-file-association-not-working-anymore-as-a/82b03dea-6be1-4bb3-8060-3cb2bca0a030

File associations typically get messed up when you try to open a file that doesn't have a default program set, and then Windows prompts you to choose a program to open the file with, and asks whether you want it to always use that program for those file types or just once. You can also mess up file associations if you try to open a file that already has a default program with another program, and then accidentally choose to always open it with that program (ie opening a .docx file with notepad, and then choosing always open with notepad, resulting in all .docx icons changing to the default .txt icon and always opening in notepad).

It is still possible that this could be a bug in osu!lazer, but this could probably also be caused by some pc cleaning/repair tool or other programs.

Unfortunately there's not much to diagnose at this point if your friend has reset his system already.

Ah, I see. Well thank you very much Lethal, you've been extraordinary helpful. After consideration of what you've said I'd probably classify this as a one-off bug that won't probably ever happen again. Maybe his OS just got all silly for a minute and decided to make everything osu!lazer.

Thank you for your help, have a very nice day, life, and everything past that.

No problem, happy I could provide some insight! Cheers!