Some Start Menu shortcuts not working

I did some digging and found some situations that sound similar to my
problem, but none covered the same issue I'm seeing.

I've been running Vista for several months now. At some time in the last
week or two, many of my Start Menu shortcuts have stopped working. If I
look at the properties of those shortcuts, it seems to be the ones that
don't have an actual path in the Target field. E.g. Word has "Microsoft
Office Professional Edition 2003" instead of an actual path to WINWORD.EXE,
and that shortcut doesn't work. Nothing happens when you select it.
However the shortcut to Notepad has "%SystemRoot%\system32\notepad.exe" in
its Target field, and it works just fine.

This only happens with SOME of the shortcuts. E.g. the "recently used"
list of shortcuts in the Start menu does this, and if I type WinKey-WORD
and select the Microsoft Word shortcut that shows up there, it doesn't
work. But if I select the Word shortcut under Start -> All Programs ->
Microsoft Office, it works just fine -- even though it also has the non-
path Target field.

What has happened to these "special" shortcuts? How do I fix it and
prevent this from happening again?

Gary

I've always re-dragged the shortcut back to the start menu from the
program files menu.


--
bobblehead1706

That would probably work for the start menu shortcuts. But I'm a keyboard-
shortcut kinda guy. In XP I used to type WinKey and then a single letter
to launch apps. In Vista I type WinKey then type enough to identify
something (like "word") to select and launch apps. I don't know how I'd
fix those, since they don't seem to be the same as the shortcuts under
Programs -> Microsoft Office.

I'd rather find out why they quit working and fix the problem.
Gary

Oh BTW: This might have started just about the time I installed SP1, hmmm.
Not sure, though. It might have started before I installed it.

Anyone? No idea what causes this and how to prevent it?

I've solved it! Thanks to this post:
http://www.winmatrix.com/forums/inde...howtopic=14341
which referenced http://windowsxp.mvps.org/slowrightclick.htm,
I determined it was caused by a faulty context-menu handler. By using
ShellExView from NirSoft (http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/shexview.html), I
determined which context menu was bad -- DiffDoc, in my case. I disabled
that context menu, and shazam! All my shortcuts work properly again.

Bizarre symptoms for a problem like that, but at least now I know how to
fix it if it happens again.

Gary