Loko’s Domain You live and learn. At any rate, you live.

Recently the company I work for decided to start upgrading computers capable of handling Windows 7 Professional and purchasing new computers with Windows 7 Professional. We have had zero problems over the last month. Well, until the last two weeks. Several users began requesting assistance because many shortcuts on their desktop went missing.

I should note that these were all data migrations to the Windows 7 machines. I had their data backed up, so I was able to go back and copy over what shortcuts they’ve lost.

At first I thought the user might have accidentally dragged a field of shortcuts into a random folder. Maybe it went in the recycling bin and it was emptied. Neither of these quick assumptions were right, so the next idea was Desktop Cleanup. It turns out that “Desktop Cleanup” is actually automated under Windows 7.

Microsoft Support: Desktop shortcuts disappear in Windows 7

These shortcuts are regarded as broken and are deleted by the System Maintenance troubleshooter.

Broken? These shortcuts weren’t “broken”. There is also no limit on the shortcuts removed, only a minimum of four if detected. You aren’t given confirmation to remove these shortcuts, they simply vanish.

Well, I did not want to disable the Diagnostic service or stop Computer Maintenance. That would mean we would have to disable this service on every Windows 7 machine going forward. I didn’t like that idea.

Personally I have, in the 12+ months I’ve used Windows 7, never had “broken” shortcuts removed from my desktop, so I thought about certain attributes the shortcuts might have that were removed compared to the shortcuts that were not removed. The first instance I notice is the target link.

e.g. Target: “W:\Accounting\Billing\May-24-2010.xls”

The only shortcuts on the three desktops that were removed were using the actual mapped drive letter as the target. The shortcuts with the computer name and full location on the server as the target were not removed.

e.g. Target: “\\LDM-SVR\Billing Department\Accounting\Billing\May-24-2010.xls”

So, I went through each computer, opened the Properties for every shortcut, and manually changed the Shortcut Target. So far, it’s been fine. No shortcuts have been removed and no one has gained a mess of desktop real estate suddenly.

As I’m not entirely sure this is the silver bullet to the bug just yet as this was performed Friday, I will keep this one updated over the course of the next week if shortcuts go missing again.