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Brink said:

I don't know of a setting in Windows that would disable them. Possible 3rd party program the cause??

I thought I'd try again in "clean boot" mode, but there was no difference. Of course something a 3rd party program did or maybe one of my customization registry fixes may have done it and the problem remains even when the program is not running.

I also thought I'd run in safe mode (via msconfig) to see how it behaved but that opened a new can of worms and an opportunity to learn (from your valuable tutorial) about safe mode and bcdedit. My computer got stuck in a continuous reboot cycle. Upon googling, I got good and bad advice. The good was "you must boot outside of windows since windows is now useless" The bad was "you need to edit the boot.ini file". Took a while to find any mention of bcdedit but I sure found a lot of frustrated Vista/7 users saying "there is no booy.ini". So my next question is why when I use msconfig to go into safe mode I'm stuck in a continuous reboot loop.

Brink said:

Not sure why, but this may help next time.

Startup Repair Infinite Loop Recovery

That is basically a method of getting to "startup repair":
"7. Windows will search for an attempt to repair startup problems". I was able to do a startup repair via my Windows install disk. I looked at the list of tests it performed and it's conclusion was that it passed every test so it decided there was nothing wrong with Windows boot process. But after I hit "restart" it booted up to the login screen and then immediately did a shut down and restart again. That's what led me to bcdedit and your tutorial. Should it matter if I get to startup repair via the hard drive vs. the Windows Install disk?

Brink said:

...a clean install.

Yes, the clean install will eventually fix both the problem with the "shell:xxx" commands and the problem of creating the infinite loop when booting into safe mode from msconfig. But apparently the only way to get out of the "infinite safe-mode-boot loop" is to use bcdedit via command prompt (provided by an install disk) to delete the "safeboot" line per your great tutorial: Safe Mode
bcdedit /deletevalue {your bcdedit identifier name} safeboot