Office shortcuts broken

[Knut arne Vedaa]

All the shortcuts related to Office 10 have ceased to work. They show only a generic icon, and when launched display some message a la "This only works for programs currently installed".

These shortcuts seems to be of a special type, i.e. their target field is greyed out and can not be edited. Their target fields are blank in this case.

Is there a way to restore these shortcuts without reinstalling Office? Of course it is possible to set up new shortcuts manually, but for some of them I don't know which exe file they refer to.

I suppose these special kinds of shortcuts refer to some string in the registry which in turn refer to the actual exe file, and that these registry keys might be broken somehow.

[Paul Komski]

Never seen Office 10. Was it only a beta version of Office XP? Anyway I dont think that is the problem. MS, of course, has to do things to its own apps in non-standard ways and form Office 2000 onwards the shortcuts it produced do have this greyed line in them; a line for which I dont know the reference. So if you dont want to repair or to resintall Office you will need to make your own. WINWORD.EXE, MSACCESS.EXE, EXCEL.EXE and POWERPNT.EXE are the four most commonly used office apps. If your one isnt in the list just tell us what that app is that you need the filename for.

[Sylvander]

"Their target fields are blank in this case."
In your situation I'd take 15 minutes to restore an image backup of my C: partition made before the problem was introduced.
If you don't have such a backup but do have WinXP you could "jump back" to a "Restore Point".
What made these changes and broke the links to the targets?
And when did it happen?
If you don't want to do the above you could always search for all ".exe" files.
I just did such a search and found all my office programs in "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office".
It would be easy for me to make new shortcuts to these on the desktop, but I'd be wondering what OTHER nasty changes had also been made.
That's why I'd restore a backup made when all was well.
These sort of changes should be used as an indicator that something nasty may be at work.

Office programs found:

[Knut arne Vedaa]

Hi and thanks for your answers. Creating new shortcuts is a reasonably workable solution. However, since I like to not only get things to work, but also to know how and why it works and why and how it did not work in the first place, and to know what kind of nasty stuff Microsoft is up to :) I never get completely satisfied with such solutions. :) Maybe there is a documentation of the .LNK file format somewhere?

[Paul Komski]

Maybe there is a documentation of the .LNK file format somewhere?

Zipped pdf file at:-


The Windows Shortcut File Format (Acrobat) Jesse Hager (http://www.wotsit.org/search.asp?page=23&s=ALLFILES)