Marshall’s Weblog

Because one year running Windows without a reformat is probably way too long, I decided to clean up my Windows box at work a week ago. I ran a few registry cleaners, I recreated my user profile, uninstalled programs that I do not use, and ran defrag on the filesystem and the pagefile. This actually seemed to speed it up a bit, but it had a negative side effect of breaking shortcuts (.lnk files).

When I would install a program, I would get an error like Error 1909: Unable to create shortcut . Even more annoying: when I left-clicked on a shortcut, be it on my desktop or on the start menu, Windows would completely freeze and become unresponsive for 20-30 seconds. The most dreadful side-effect was that the Quick Launch toolbar would not stay on my menubar when I restarted my computer.

Today I found this post on Google Groups that pointed me to ShellExView, a nice freeware utility for editing the context menus of all file types. The culprit in my case was the Offline File Menu option. I used disabled the item and shortcuts immediately started to become more responsive. Left-clicking would no longer freeze Windows and the context menu would appear almost instantaneously. I quickly restarted my computer and to my surprise, the Quick Launch toolbar was back.

I am glad that I never have to worry about this stuff on my linux box or my Powerbook.

Edit: Funny Bash.org quote