Windoze Shortcuts

[Jim Herrmann]

Thanks for all your replies to my post, but so far none are solutions. 
First off, as I said in my original post, this is a Win NT 4 laptop, and 
it has Norton Anti-Virus, plus our company uses Lotus Notes for E-mail, 
which seriously reduces the chance of getting a worm or virus.  I 
checked and there is no virus.  At least not one that is recognized yet. 
  So, let's not pursue that line of suggestions for now.  Somehow the 
registry got hosed.  Who knows how that happened with that closed source 
mystery black box that is the Windoze registry?  Did you know that the 
hints, you know at startup, are stored in the registry?  How f@*king 
stupid is that?

Anyway, I found some entries that I fixed in HKEY_LOCAL_ROOT that were 
for ".lnk", ".lnk2", "lnkfile", and "lnkfile2" that I exported from 
another machine, imported here, and fixed on this machine.  That almost 
has me fixed up.  I got my icons back and the right click menu is fixed. 
  The only thing left now is that when I double click on the shortcuts, 
they do nothing.  I can right click on the shortcut, select open (which 
is bold indicating that is the default), and launch the shortcuts 
properly, but double click does nothing.  This also means that the Start 
menu still doesn't work.  This is the same for all users of the machine, 
and I have deleted, and recreated my winnt user profile once already, to 
no avail.

This is a stumper.  I'm thinking image the damn thing and reinstall the 
unique software that my position requires.  That would be much faster 
than all this jacking around.  But I'm so close to fixing the problem. 
Damn!

Thanks for any new ideas you might have.

Peace,
Jim

Jim Herrmann wrote:

> 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
> 
> 
> 
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