Stopping XP from deleting shortcuts in Start menu, how?

[fitwell]

I know XP has the annoying Desk Cleanup Wizard that one can untick in
Desktop properties (Display Properties > Desktop > Customize
Desktop... > General tab under section "Desktop cleanup") but there
must be something else at work. I always disable that.

It's the Start menu that has disappearing items on it, without knowing
how to disable.

I recently switched around all my files from one external hard drive
to another one, from a smaller to a larger one, and so over last
couple of weeks incorrectly addressed shortcuts were in my Start menu,
pending my slowly correcting the addresses. I keep going to the Start
menu only to find missing blocks of shortcuts that were there the day
before.

Where can we turn this behaviour off, please, anyone know? Throughout
the years I've used XP I've googled and I've asked in a couple of
forums over the but years but no-one has ever known what I mean. If
you also went from Win98SE to WinXP you'll know this annoyance. 98SE
never deleted any shortcuts, XP does so regularly.

How to disable please?

Thx.

[83LowRider]

fitwell wrote:

> Where can we turn this behaviour off, please, anyone know? Throughout
> the years I've used XP I've googled and I've asked in a couple of
> forums over the but years but no-one has ever known what I mean. If
> you also went from Win98SE to WinXP you'll know this annoyance. 98SE
> never deleted any shortcuts, XP does so regularly.
>
> How to disable please?

XP has never deleted any shortcuts from my many
computers running it.

You may have Personalized Menu checked?

Right click on Quick Launch bar > Properties >
Start Menu > Customize > and uncheck Use
Personalized Menus.

[fitwell]

On Tue, 11 Sep 2012 14:54:56 -0400, fitwell <NoS...@NoJunkMail.com>
wrote:

Trying again. Does anyone know why XP decides to delete icons from
the Start menu? It does so with annoying frequency with no rhyme or
reason.

Thx.

[dadiOH]

In the years that I have used XP, that has never occured. Not for me, not
for my wife, not for anyone I know. I went from 98 to XP; actually,
95>98>XP.

IOW, I have no idea but my best guess is "user error".

HTH & HAND

--

dadiOH
____________________________

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[§ñühwö£f]

You have a second copy of the file with the links-to shortcuts somewhere
on yer hard drive. Its a duplicate and prolly the only way to fix is to
delete that User, create another and start over.


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[Desk Rabbit]

Yup, never seen that happen here on any of the many hundreds of desktops
we support other than user error.

[dadiOH]

With fitwell (AKA various) it is virtually a given.

[Buffalo]

"fitwell" wrote in message
news:iu2tm8lhgmsv0629o...@4ax.com...

Are you using a program like CCleaner or similar? It may be causing the
deletions if it is set to do so.
Buffalo

[VanguardLH]

fitwell wrote:

> Trying again. Does anyone know why XP decides to delete icons from
> the Start menu? It does so with annoying frequency with no rhyme
> or reason.

Did you leave Windows configured to show "personalized" start menus?
If so, you should see a chevron at the bottom of a submenu on which
you click to see the remaining but initially hidden entries.
Personalized means the most recent you've used. The old ones gets
hidden until you expand the submenu.

[fitwell]

On Wed, 17 Apr 2013 17:49:25 +0100, Desk Rabbit <m...@example.com>
wrote:

It happens all the time on mine and throughout all the years I've been
using XP. I periodically save a backup and use a Windows Explorer
replacement which shows file size better than WE does and nearly each
time I make a backup, there are bytes missing. Since random files are
deleted, and I imagine it's due to shortcuts that temporarily have
incorrect info in them like when I move or rename a file, it's
difficult to know which files to put back all the time. This happens
in Start menu, Quick Launch menu.

The other day, I retrieved an old backup of some shortcuts to a failed
hard drive that I retrieved from backup and was in process of updating
the new shortcut locations. One moment all the shortcuts were there,
10 minutes later, 90 percent of them were gone when I got back to the
file. I did nothing manually or programatically whatsoever, yet the
evidence was clear. I had to re-copy the files and that 2nd time,
stayed in the folder and updated right then and there as I then had
all the missing paths.

I immediately turn off the desktop cleaner feature after an OS
wipe/reinstall so have never figured out where XP gets the idea that I
need any sort of cleanup done at any time.

[fitwell]

Yes, I do. Interesting. I haven't set it to do this myself so will
have to look into this. I noticed this behaviour in WinXP before I
ever got CCleaner so don't know if this is the fix, but I'll check the
settings now. I use portable CCleaner so don't check each time I do a
wipe/reinstall. Perhaps it's some default thing that gets reset even
though CCleaner settings don't change between OS wipes/reinstalls.

Hmm ... will look now.

[fitwell]

Nope, I always turn that off after an OS wipe/reinstall. I hate that
feature! <g>

Thanks. Might have been interesting if that feature being turned on
was the culprit. I abhor fluid menus and like static ones, even
though I do use a lot of keyboard, too. Whatever is fastest, most
efficient way to a command is what I use.

Anyway, not the cause here of the problem.

Thx.

[fitwell]

On Mon, 22 Apr 2013 00:17:40 -0500, fitwell <NoS...@NoJunkMail.com>
wrote:

>On Wed, 17 Apr 2013 15:15:58 -0600, "Buffalo"
><pho...@physco.invalid.net> wrote:
>
>>"fitwell" wrote in message
>>news:iu2tm8lhgmsv0629o...@4ax.com...
>>>
>>>On Tue, 11 Sep 2012 14:54:56 -0400, fitwell <NoS...@NoJunkMail.com>
>>>wrote:
>>>
>>>>I know XP has the annoying Desk Cleanup Wizard that one can untick in
>>>>Desktop properties (Display Properties > Desktop > Customize
>>>>Desktop... > General tab under section "Desktop cleanup") but there
>>>>must be something else at work. I always disable that.
>>>>
>>>>It's the Start menu that has disappearing items on it, without knowing
>>>>how to disable.

[snip]

>>>>How to disable please?
>>>>
>>>>Thx.

[snip]

>>Are you using a program like CCleaner or similar? It may be causing the
>>deletions if it is set to do so.
>>Buffalo
>
>Yes, I do. Interesting. I haven't set it to do this myself so will
>have to look into this. I noticed this behaviour in WinXP before I
>ever got CCleaner so don't know if this is the fix, but I'll check the
>settings now. I use portable CCleaner so don't check each time I do a
>wipe/reinstall. Perhaps it's some default thing that gets reset even
>though CCleaner settings don't change between OS wipes/reinstalls.
>
>Hmm ... will look now.

Wouldn't you know ... I finally had a moment to check and it just may
very well be that CCleaner has been the culprit all along! I never
really checked in-depth all the options other than in the first couple
of months after I started using CCleaner. But here's what I found ...

When you open up CCleaner, at least in my portable version, there are
several buttons on the left-hand side. The top one is labelled
"Cleaner". When that button is selected, 2 tabs appear on the right:
"Windows" and "Applications". Under the Windows one there are various
items listed underneath - Internet Explorer, Windows Explorer, System
and Advanced.

And under that "System" one there is an entry labelled, as can be
guessed:

"Start Menu Shortcuts"

That option has now been unticked. If all goes well, there'll be no
more deleted shortcuts!!

I'm the type of person who would rather run a shortcut utility that
searches for ones that need their paths changed than with something
that just automatically deletes them. There are no obsolete shortcuts
in my Start menu, only occasional ones that have changed paths or
changed names that need to be fixed.

Thanks. This should do the trick. But I'll know within the next few
weeks. If my compressed files of shortcut backups stop decreasing in
size periodically and instead remain the same or increase, then I'll
know for sure CCleaner was the reason behind this issue.

I'll report back.

Cheers.

[dadiOH]

Yep, user error.

[VanguardLH]

Are you running (manually or as a background process) or scheduled any
cleanup tools? If so, they might delete "dead" shortcuts.

Looks like from your later reply that you had CCleaner configured to
delete start menu shortcuts (under its Cleaner -> System category).
That is not enabled in my configuration (which is close to the default
config) so you must have made changes to the default config. CCleaner
can clean out a lot of stuff that doesn't really need to be cleaned,
like the Prefetch folder. It would be handy if Ccleaner gave help on
each cleanup item so users knew what was going to get cleaned up for
each entry in Ccleaner.

[fitwell]

Sorry for the delay in responding back; I thought I had. But I see
that if I did, I somehow deleted my response just in case this happens
to someone else and they'd like to figure out what's going on.

At any rate, to report back, in effect it truly was CCleaner that was
the culprit! After your message above, I disabled the deleting of
"dead" shortcuts and all has been fine since then.

After a wipe-reinstall, it might take me some time to get back to
updating some of the links. Windows like to every-once-in-a-while,
map different drives to my partitions, so the shortcuts appear "dead".
They're not; just waiting to be updated. But in interim of fixing all
of them which can sometimes take a bit even if I mostly use
ShortcutDoctor to do this and not manually one-by-one, but I'd be
cleaning up my Recycle Bin, etc., with CCleaner a few times in the
interim. So all I was seeing was shrinking sizes in the RAR file
backups that I would do periodically of the start menu and that's what
had me baffled. Happy to say that since I unticked that option in
CCleaner, this stopped happening and my start menu has remained
intact.

My bad for blaming XP ... this time!

So thanks for this info.

Cheers.

[Buffalo]

"VanguardLH" wrote in message news:kl3h8j$3ou$1...@news.albasani.net...

Is there a good reason not to have CC delete 'Old Prefetch data' ?
Thanks,
--
Buffalo

[Buffalo]

"Buffalo" wrote in message news:l18m8a$3ba$1...@dont-email.me...

Never mind, I looked it up and now I will not use CC to clean Old Prefetch
data.
http://www.populartechnology.net/2005/10/ccleaner-cripples-application-load.html
--
Buffalo