Re: Shortcuts are now .lnk and will not open

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SWalters wrote:
I have a customer which had this happen to him. This was also in combination with not being able to open most .exe files like cmd.exe or regedit.exe. I was able to fix the .exe issue by renaming regedit.exe to regedit.com in order to access the registry. But I still cannot fix the .lnk issue. No shortcuts work nor do newly created ones. I have tried all of the regitry edits coming from multiple sites as well as Microsoft's and JSI's. I've tried restarting after each change as well as completely shutting down. I've also researched newsgroups and google pretty extensively and everything that comes up is the usual fixing of the .lnk and lnkfile registry entries. I've also exported such entries from a known working Windows 2000 workstation but yet...Nothing...

I'm afraid I will be reloading his workstation this weekend because of this. I was putting it off because there is usually a fix for any issue but this one is starting to take too long to find the resolution.

Can anyone else help with this?


A few years ago I slipped somehow and made Notepad be the application to handle .lnk files. Of course, none of my desktop shortcuts would work after that. It sounds like you mangled the association for .exe. It took me several days to fix my problem and I had to learn a lot about how the registry works in the process.

I suggest you look at another machine side by side to yours. Use regedit to look at the registry type "exefile" and make sure everything agrees with the known good machine.

.

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