Applications no longer show in the Start Menu

edit: well, that was a quick fix. After I looked in the Start Menu properties to see if there were any settings there I could change, applications now show up fine.

Yesterday I was upgrading a friend's laptop from Vista to 7. Before installing 7, I wanted to take a backup of their user folder. Usually for this I'd just boot some Linux distro and copy the files to my server over NFS, however this laptop only had a Fast Ethernet port, so I decided to just attach their hard drive to my Windows 7 desktop and copy the files over to the server that way (the server doesn't support drive hot swapping).

When I mounted the drive it didn't show up in Explorer, so I changed its letter to A since D is assigned to a network and it showed up. Then when I went to copy the files from the attached drive, I found that I didn't have permission to access some user folders, so I used "Take Ownership" and was able to access everything.

Everything was fine with the backup, however today I noticed that my start menu no longer shows applications when I search. When I search, I only get files and control panel items. Confused, I checked my Start Menu folder in AppData, and all my application shortcuts were still there. I also check in the All Users Start Menu folder and again, all the application shortcuts are there.

Why would applications not be showing up in my Start Menu? I'm thinking I may have accidentally messed up my own user folder's permissions thinking I was in the folder I was backing up.

I did notice though in my user account folder, Application Data, Cookies, Local Settings, My Documents, NetHood, PrintHood, Recent, SenDTo, Start Menu and Templates all have the "no icon"-looking icon:



..rather than being faded folder shortcuts (I have hidden OS files set to shown).

Thanks :)

Thank you for telling us the solution!