Some desktop shortcuts disappeared - why?

Running Win7 home premium with all updates on an i5 PC built in Dec 2011.
Yesterday, out of 50 shortcut ions on my desktop, 6 of them disappeared! The missing shortcuts were to:

- Control panel
- Disk management
- A shared network folder
- To 3 programs

I looked in C:\Users\UserName\Desktop and in C:\Users\Public\Public desktop but the missing shortcuts are missing from those folders also.

Why is Win7 deleting some of my desktop shortcuts?
Sky

Brink said:

Hello Sky,

It may be the "System Maintenance Troubleshooter" that removed them. You could use the tutorial below to turn it off to see if that may help.

System Maintenance Troubleshooter - Turn On or Off

Hope this helps,
Shawn

Ok, I turned Computer Maintenance "Off".

Should I leave the remaining two options checked?
(x)Allow users to browse for troubleshooters available from the Windows Online Troubleshooting service.
(x)Allow troubleshooting to begin immediately when satarted.

Thanks for your ever present help Shawn (Brink),
Sky

Brink said:

Yeah, those two options do not matter when "System Maintenance Troubleshooter" is turned off.

Did your missing shortcuts on the desktop return after turning off "System Maintenance Troubleshooter"?

If not, then leave it turned off, and manually create new shortcuts for them on your desktop. Afterwards, see if they disappear again like this in the future.

No, the missing shortcuts did not return. They are not in the "desktop" folders so Win7 must have deleted them automatically thinking it's smarter than me. I hate software that think it knows better than the user and does thing automatically without the user's permission. ........ No, make that "I hate programmers that program code that does that".

I'll create new shortcuts and post again if they disappear with the system maintenance troubleshooter turned off.

Thanks,
Sky

Nine shortcut icons on my Win7 desktop disappeared again yesterday.

I double checked the system maintenance troubleshooter and it is still "Off".
=====
Windows will check for routine maintenance issues and remind you when the system maintenance troubleshooter can help fix problems.
( ) On
(x) Off
=====

Any other ideas?

Brink said:

Well, so much for it being the system maintenance troubleshooter. What were these shortcuts to?

Do the files that the shortcuts point to still run if you manually run them instead?

I'll have to figure out which shortcuts were deleted. I should have taken a picture with my camera when all of the shortcuts were displayed. Now even the blank spaces where the shortcuts were are gone since I had enabled clone displays to watch some video on our TV set and when I switched back to monitor, the monitor's screen resolution somehow changed to 1024x768 and I had to change it back to native resolution of 1640 x 1080. All of the icons were rearranged during that senario.

Are you running any type of 3rd party maintenance software that may be removing them?

No 3rd party maintenance software running at all in foreground or background. The only things I remember doing prior to the shortcut icons disappearing were:
- browsing forums using Firefox.
- doing email using Thunderbird.
- running Visual C++ via Visual Studio 10.
- reading some data on a couple of excel spreadsheets.
- composing and reading data using MS word.

I'll take a picture of my desktop icons and see which ones are missing when they disappear again. Meanwhile, if I need to run something, I'll discover that the desktop shortcut is missing.

Googling, I see that others have had Win7 desktop shortcuts disappear also so this problem is not unique to me. I'm running a legal copy of Win7 home premium with all "important" updates.

Thanks,
Sky