How to recover Start>Programs Shortcuts, Accessories, ETC

gang I recoved a system from a nasty ZA infection. Runs well, in fact spectacularly well, but the residual damage is the loss of visibility of programs. All of the builtin programs like System tools, Accessories [paint, notepad, wordpad etc etc] are invisible.

how do I recover all that? the programs are intact and I guess I could eventually find them all and make shortcuts one at a time but it still wouldn't look very good.

help pls...puhleez...

The 'All Users' Start Menu is stored at C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\; The User Start Menu at C:\Users\YOUR USER NAME\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\. If you navigate to these folders, right click the Start Menu folders, you can select Properties. Click over to the 'Previous Versions' tab. There may be shadow copies of each of the two folders you can restore from.

I would begin by trying the 'All Users' menu.

Best Wishes,
Rªnce

thanks to both.
i'll go to work. let you know

looks pretty good. you were right in that its a smoother path to work with the all-users settings. the other path is full of potholes.
one thing that wasn't clear in the tutorial was the distinction between folders and their contents, and that, oddly enough, some don't need the "unblock" step. simply paste them in the start group and they worked. others had to be unblocked and copy/pasted one at a time.

victory!

Glad to hear it. Shadow copies is a great feature that help make Windows 7 the best offering from Microsoft to date.

Be Well,
Rªnce