Desktop shortcuts disappear in Windows 7

[Capt.Jack Sparrow]

Hello,

I guess lot of them are having the problem where the Desktop icons disappears. Today i found a Microsoft KB thought of posting it.

Desktop shortcuts disappear in Windows 7

Hope this helps,
Captain

 

[Jet B]

Thanks Captain Jack.

I had some shortcuts on my desktop disappear. They were games ones from the start menu games folder, but the game shortcuts that were linked directly from where the games were installed were untouched.

Now, to figure out why the system classed those shortcuts as broken...

 

[whs]

It is a strange habit anyhow to keep tons of shortcuts on the desktop - looks very untidy and are inaccessible when you are on another page. They are much better placed into docks or toolbars. Then the said problem cannot occur and they are always available.

 

[Jet B]

Well whs, that is purely a matter of opinion. There are a lot of people using windows software and to expect them to all prefer the same desktop/shortcuts setup is silly.

After further research, I discovered that it is a system maintenance utility that is removing the shortcuts once a week. It is supposed to remove broken and unused shortcuts(3 months).

For some reason known only to micro-soft perhaps, it is classing any shortcut to a shell program like the games start menu folder or control panel etc. as broken and removes them.

If you have more than 4 of these "broken" shortcuts on your desktop, they will all get removed. 4 or less supposedly won't be touched. My temporary fix to this was to put most of my games shortcuts in a folder on my desktop and just keep the 4 games out that I am playing the most. I don't believe the utility will touch shortcuts that are in a folder on your desktop, but someone correct me if I'm wrong because I haven't had time to test it. Another fix is to disable the utility, but I didn't want to do this because it performs other useful functions too.

And for the information of people like whs who can't understand why someone would have shortcuts on the desktop... I have 23 games on my computer and I find it much easier to keep track of them all if I can see them in front of me on a daily basis. I don't like to use the start menu games folder because not all the games install themselves to that folder and I like to keep them all in one place so I don't forget about a game that I haven't played in a while. :sarc: