Taskbar & Start Menu - Duplicate Icons

Hi all,

First post here so bear with me.

I recently bought a second user machine from a colleague of mine. He re-installed Windows 7 so that everything was fresh and set up a new profile for me but I wasn't happy with the name of the profile that he had set up. Anyway to cut a long story short I created a new profile, copied the old files across and deleted the old profile I wasn't happy with.

Everything is working fine and as it should be but I have a now have a couple of annoyances with a number of the programs that I have pinned to the taskbar and the start menu. For example when I pinned Firefox and Thunderbird to the taskbar it has named them as Firefox (2) and Thunderbird (2) as if they are duplicate programs/shortcuts. The same is true with some of the programs that I have pinned to the start menu. For example when I pinned CCleaner to the start menu Windows named it as CCleaner (2) even though it wasn't present in the first place. If I try to rename it to CCleaner (as it should appear) Windows tells me that there is already a program by that name pinned there and it asks me if I would like to rename it CCleaner (3).

As far as I can tell it doesn't affect the performance of such programmes, its just really really frustrating. Would it have anything to do with the files that I copied across from my old profile? If anyone could help me resolve this issue it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Any ideas anyone?

Use CCleaner to remove the icons cache in the taskbar/start menu. It has an option to remove the recently icons of what was recently launched. By default the option System-Start Menu Shortcuts is disabled. Enable it and run the cleaning :).

Thanks ROF by unfortunately nothing happened.

I've noticed now I have the exact same issue! I've only see my icons and don't see the text until right click. I've messed my OS a coulple of times and copied some old user files over the new ones.
Here is the way to fix this.
Go to my computer and press F3 to search and scan for this file Mozilla Firefox.lnk if the problem is with Firefox. You have to scan for each shortcut.
I had 4-5 shortcuts with date 27.7 BUT one with older date 24.6 so I deleted it and HORRAY! I managed to rename Mozilla Firefox (2).lnk in the taskbar to Mozilla Firefox.lnk. The problem is caused because the old icon is placed in the system folder but not registered and so it doesn't show in the taskbar but exists as an icon in the system just not there .

RhapsodyOfFire,

Thank you, that has solved the problem. Thank you once again.

whs,

Thanks for the link. It didn't solve the problem but I have bookmarked the thread for future reference.

Found a more direct way to address this duplicate shortcut problem.
Turn on view hidden files first.

Then go to c:\user\%username%\AppData\lRoaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch\User Pinned\StartMenu

Then delete the shortcuts in there.
Log off, log back on.
Pin your shortcuts again using the right click on the start menu items.