Problem with Control Panel

[Aseem Sheik]

Hello Friends,

I have installed Windows Vista on my system. From last few days, whenever i try to open my Control Panel its item are shown without name. Can any one tell me why this problem occur suddenly on my pc? Can any help me out to get rid of this problem?

Thanks.

[Macarenas]

In Windows Vista, there's a new syntax for opening control panel items - you can use the /name switch to pass the friendly name to control.exe instead of the difficult syntax.

For instance, if you want to open the Power Options panel you could run the following command from either the command line or the start menu search box:

control.exe /name Microsoft.PowerOptions

[kattman]

Following steps will create cascading menus for items in these special folders, giving you instant access to them from the Start Menu:

1. Right click on the "Start" (menu) button and select "Explore"

2. Right click inside the "Start Menu" folder (which should automatically show up after step #1), and select "New | Folder"

3. To create a cascading Control Panel menu, type following for the newly created folder's name:

Control Panel.{21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D}

[ThoMas321]

The Control Panel containing three managed items:

That's because when they were installed a reg key with this short name was created in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Paths\.

To create a new short name, create a new key with any name (file name: no special characters), and don't forget the extension (even if you don't need to type it when launching), put ".exe" if you don't know what else to put. Modify its default value with the real app path. And best of all, you can use a shortcut as the path ! This means you can make special shortcuts as described below and link to them. For example typing "mycomp" would really open this special folder.

Zeratul adds an even easier way. Any shortcut you drop in your windows folder, renamed to something rememberable, can just be typed in the run box too. And ofcourse that gets even easier with the address bar added to the taskbar (rightclick taskbar, toolbars).Command creator (shareware (once free), all Windows versions) will make all that easier by modifying the registry for you with a cool interface.But here's Short Run, great little tool to add any command for free. Those using their run box often should check it out. Another way proposed by madpigeon, is to modify HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\URL\Prefixes.