While I solved this problem by moving all the files from the folders, i am still kinda curious how it happened so if anyone wwants to take a whack at it. I just assume it is anothe rcase of "Stupid Fedora Syndrome"

Anyways: I had 2 folders, each with subfolders, containing video files that belonged to me "mike" Their permission were hapahazard so I wanted to change them all to rw-r-r.
I went to terminal and in the main directory typed chmod 644 -Rv *.
I got errors on every file saying "permission denied". So I did what I always do in this case, do it as root. I did the su command to make my terminal root, still got the error. I logged off as mike and logged on as root in X and tried again/. This time it worked. Thenb when i went back to the files in mike, all of the folders appeared as general icons and Nautilus didn't know what to do with them.I tried opening the files from xine but it didn;t recognize the folders as folders and gave me the standard "not a video file, jackass" error. I logged out mike, logged in root and was able to see and play the files as root. I thus moved the files out of that directory and am able to see the files.

Strange.

I guess the first time you tried with chmod there was 'umask' set. Why you wasn't able to see file types later, I don't know, maybe MIME issue, but I can only guess.