Vista - Disappearing Icons on start menu

Hi,

Can anyone offer a solution as to how to get my application icons back so
that I can see them in the "All Programs" section.

I am running Vista Ultimate 32-bit and is up to date. The problem that I
have is that nearly all of the applications that I have installed on my pc,
such as Office, Photoshop, various games etc... have disappeared completely
and some of the folders such as "lightscribe", "Extras and Upgrades",
"EveMon" that do appear on there are now showing as empty, even though the
EveMon and Lightscribe applications are running as normal i.e. from startup.

I haven't installed, removed, upgraded anything. Antivirus etc... is up to
date and my machine is showing as clear, and I am the only one who uses it.
The applications are still installed on my pc and show in "programs and
features". If I navigate to the program files folder on the drive I can
access the applications from there by running the exe file.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated as I don't particularly wish to
start removing and reinstalling them all.

Hello,

You might see if clicking on "lnk" in the table at the site below to download and merge the reg file can help fix your problem for you. It restores the default associations for shortcuts.

http://www.winhelponline.com/article...ows-Vista.html

Hope this helps,
Shawn

Hey Brink,

Thanks for the response i'll give that a go in the morning as I've just got
in from work.

One query though, would this work for applications that have completely
disappeared from the start menu? For example I have Adobe Photoshop
installed. The application directory is still in the Program Files directory
on the hard disk and if I search for the exe file I can run Photoshop with no
problem. The issue is that the Adobe program group doesn't even appear in the
All Programs Group on the start menu anymore. My All Programs list was one
and a half lists, it now no longer fills the unextended space in the start
menu.

I'll give it a go though and report back.

Thanks

Si

"Brink" wrote:

Hi Shawn,

Thanks for the post but unfortunately it did not make any difference.

I do believe that I may have figured out what it might be though as I now
have my icons back and the start menu is fully populated again. I did a
system restore back to the point when I knew it was fine, took some finding
though as all the links had disappeared. Anyway as it happens the last known
good point took it back to before 3 windows updates were applied - hey presto
all icons are back again. I have since re-applied the updates and everything
is good - so far.

Don't know why they would have done that but they are the only things that
had changed since it was working last - maybe they did not apply correctly or
something.

Anyways all is good for now so thanks.

Si

"sl0sh3dp3ngu1n" wrote:

I'm happy to hear that you got it sorted out. Thank you for posting back your results.

Shawn