Desktop shortcuts to items on network drives sometimes disappear from desktop

Anonymous

I have a number of shortcut icons on my Windows 7 (RC1) desktop to networked items - some are folders on a NAS, some are mapped as drives, etc. However, sometimes Windows 7 seems to simply remove all of them without notice and I have to recreate all the shortcuts to my NAS items again.

I wondered at first if this may have been because Windows would sometimes boot before all of my network devices became available, but when that happens it just correctly marks the icons with a red cross to indicate that it couldn't find them at boot time, and as soon as the NAS is available then the shortcuts work fine.

However at random intervals, all seven of these shortcuts simply disappear from the desktop. All other shortcuts and icons are fine, and the mapped drives are still present in my 'Computer' display - it's just the NAS-related shortcuts on the desktop which vanish.

Any idea why this might be happening?

Andre

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Anonymous

If you create desktop shortcuts to removable storage places such as NAS the icons will disappear from time to time because Windows 7 has a built in task schedule to clean up broken and unused links.

To prevent the task from running you need to disable the task in the task schedular: start-programs-accessories-system tools-task scheduler

Expand the tree in the left hand pane until you get to Task Scheduler Library-Microsoft-Windows-Diagnosis.

In the right hand pane, right click the task named Scheduled and click Disable.

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Anonymous

This feature is extremely annoying. Whenever I take my work laptop on the road, this has happens and I never knew why until now. In my case, when the shortcuts to my network folders and applications disappeared, there was no trace left, not in my computer or anywhere. And trying to figure out how to remap them all was a nightmare!!! Productivity lost, headaches, etc... thanks MS!

Fortunately, I found a way to get them back! Check this out:

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows\_7-desktop/how-to-restore-desktop-shortcuts/0cfe39d3-16c7-49c3-b538-6d5a3f5b6abe/

After doing the copy from previous versions, I was able to find the missing shortcuts and drag them from the 'Desktop Temp' folder to my desktop. Thank God.

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91 additional answers

Anonymous

2009-11-18T11:08:11+00:00
I think it may only check the currently logged in desktop?

The task runs at 1am on Sundays (or whenever the PC is next started after that time) but it also waits until the PC has been idle for 10 minutes before it runs - hence why it so often seems to happen 'randomly' after people resume their PC from sleep mode. It's not random, it's actually the next bootup after 1am on Sunday and after 10 minutes of idle time. Disabling it in the Task Scheduler (see previous post) should stop it happening.

If you want to check it manually on your machine (and see what else this tool does, which isn't much useful apart from maybe checking for disk volume errors) then do the following:
1. Control Panel > (System and Security) Find and Fix Problems > (System and Security) Run Maintenance Tasks.
2. Click on the 'Advanced' link and untick "Apply repairs automatically", then click on Next to start the scan.
3) When the scan is finished, click on 'View Detailed Information' to see what it would do to your system if you let it (click on Broken Shortcuts for a list of things it plans to remove).
1. Obviously Cancel at the end rather than running the delete option!
On my machine, all desktop shortcuts to any network shared locations and/or mapped drives are removed (not only when the link cannot be accessed, even currently active shared folder or mapped drive shortcuts vanish). This is quite clearly a bug in the Windows process - which is C:\Windows\System32\sdiagnhost.exe by the way - but I don't know who to report it to.

Andre
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Anonymous

2009-11-09T11:56:57+00:00

Hmm, checking that scheduled task it looks like it probably does quite a lot more system diagnosis than just removing a few 'unused' icons from the desktop, so not sure whether to turn it off or not. The randomness of the event is easier to understand now, given that this task is set to run at 1am on Sunday mornings

that is the time that my shortcuts to the mapped drives disappeared. but why just from my main profile and not from all profiles?
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Anonymous

2009-11-09T10:32:47+00:00

Hmm, checking that scheduled task it looks like it probably does quite a lot more system diagnosis than just removing a few 'unused' icons from the desktop, so not sure whether to turn it off or not. The randomness of the event is easier to understand now, given that this task is set to run at 1am on Sunday mornings (or as soon after that as possible) but only after the machine has been idle for at least 10 mins.

Is there any way to just turn off the desktop cleanup function, which was a simple user-controlled option in XP?

Andre
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