Windoze Shortcuts

[Jim Herrmann]

This is sort of off topic, but i have a problem with my Win NT 4 Compaq 
Laptop machine at work that the Windows weenies can't solve.  I present 
this here because the problem first reared it's head when I was at the 
LUG meeting Tuesday night, and you guys have a wide variety of knowledge 
and skills.  Here's the deal.

My shortcuts stopped working.  This means most things on the desktop 
don't work, and nothing in the start menu works.  I can still launch 
programs from explorer and the run... window.  The first manifestation 
was at the meeting when I booted the laptop to make a boot floppy.  At 
that time I noticed the items in the Startup folder came up with the 
"Open With.." window.  The next day, I noticed the real extent of the 
problem, in that nothing could launch.  I never realized how important 
shortcuts were to Windoze ease of use.  I can't get to a command prompt 
with out the Run.. box.

Things I have looked at and or tried to fix this include downloading 
Powertoys and using TweakUI to try to fix the icons.  No luck.  I looked 
at the registry and compared it to other machines that work, and I can 
see no difference for the .lnk extension.  I tried deleting and reading 
  the .lnk extension in the View Options->File Types dialog.  This made 
things worse, as then the icons turned into the default icon.  We tried 
deleting my profile, which had no effect.  This problem affects all 
users on this machine.

Any ideas?  The solution the PC guys have is to nuke my drive and lay 
down a new image.  I really don't want to do this if I can help it. 
Thanks for any suggestions you might have.

I hate windows more each day,
Jim

--
Listen to KC Blues great Fast Johnny Ricker at http://mp3.com/fastjohnny