Some desktop shortcuts disappeared!

zigzag3143 said:

Actually you both are 32 bit, have abt 2 gigs of ram on similar cpu's, etc.



No problem it was just my 15th post in a row for sys specs.

Did you guys install any 3rd party apps? were you both clean installs or upgrades?

Ken

Upgrade straight from MS sight .

More info on mine....lost my network connection and could not reconnect so I desided to reboot. I got the black screen with the message some apps havent shut down yet you may lose data if you continue (not sure if that was the exact statment but it was simialar...I know I should have wrote it down since this is an RC) I chose shut down anyway. After the reboot the icons were gone and still no net connection. Turned out a reboot of the router fixed the network issue though.

Kinda wish I hadnt killed that profile now because its going to be hard to trouble shot the problem.

Think Ill add my specs to a sig

I did install 2 registry hacks that were shortcut-related. One was to remove the words "Shortcut to..." from new shortcuts. The second one was to change the overlay arrow icon to make it less noticeable.

So did anyone find out what was going on and why these shortcuts were deleted (and by whom)?

ammoun said:

So did anyone find out what was going on and why these shortcuts were deleted (and by whom)?

I have the same question. I have a brand new Dell PC running Windows 7 Home edition. Yesterday more than half of my shortcuts disappeared. All were shortcuts to executables on the C drive. I had to recreate them.

I wasn't doing anything special at the time. I had created a new user account and had logged into the new account, then back into my own account. I didn't notice the missing shortcuts until later when I closed some windows.

I'm not aware of any pattern in the shortcuts themselves. For example, one user in this thread suggested that the missing shortcuts were ones that had been renamed (e.g., rename firefox.exe as firefox), but I rename all of my shortcuts.

It is hard to believe that Microsoft hasn't fixed this problem by now.

I'm having the same thing happenning. Icons (mapped drives and directory shortcuts) disappearing for no apparent reason.

Dell Optiplex 755
32-bit
Intel duo core 3GHz
4GB

I read somewhere that these shortcuts could be deleted by Win 7 as it performs some "cleaning" process without us knowing or approving such cleaning and that the deleted shortcuts are broken shortcuts and those created in earlier versions of windows (XP)! Fair enough, I tried and made sure all are not broken and I recreated the shortcuts in Win 7. A week goes by and all was well until three hours ago! After leaving my Win 7 idle for a few hours I came back to find the exact same shortcuts were missing again and are not in the trash!
What s going on?? Anyone figured it out please help us out.
Thank u all.

I have the same kind of issue, two days ago I renamed a folder to speedup a game load time that I'm doing dev work on, but I have about 15 shortcuts to subfolders that where in this, now renamed folder. Today, while out on a job, windows though it a good idea to delete all the "broken" shortcuts. I'm quite pissed to say the least... As, when I got back just now, I was about to rename said folder back to it's original name again.... Is there no way to disable the desktop cleanup "wizard" that no longer "exists" but now has free range over my desktop!!

ok, of course, after much searching and then finally posting here.... I found the "magic" words to strike a hit in google :)

If you create desktop shortcuts to removable storage places such as NAS the icons will disappear from time to time because Windows 7 has a built in task schedule to clean up broken and unused links.

To prevent the task from running you need to disable the task in the task schedular: start-programs-accessories-system tools-task scheduler
Expand the tree in the left hand pane until you get to Task Scheduler Library-Microsoft-Windows-Diagnosis.
In the right hand pane, right click the task named Scheduled and click Disable.

@ R A,

I'll do this also! Thx mate!

I don't want to have this issue again :)