All of my shortcuts go to the same program and they all have the extension, .lnk.

Hi eldonsellers,

Welcome to Microsoft answers forums!

The LNK file type is associated with windows itself. A shortcut file is a pointer to an .EXE file somewhere on your system. When you click on the shortcut its like clicking on the .EXE file and the associated program should start and run. Sometimes .LNK files will stop working. This can be because the underlying .EXE association has been broken by something (often by some form of anti-malware program improperly changing the registry) or the association in the registry can become corrupted.

I would suggest you try the following steps:

S**tep 1:**The system file checker (SFC) utility allows administrators to perform a scan of all protected resources to verify that they are the correct version. If SFC should find any incorrect versions in any of these protected resources, SFC will replace them with the correct versions.

You can always run a sfc scan on the windows vista computer. To run a sfc scan follow the steps below:

a. Click on start and in the start search bar type cmd, right click on the command prompt icon in the programs area and then click on run as administrator.

b. At the command prompt type sfc /scannow and then press enter.

Step 2: Run an online scan for any threat and try to fix them

http://onecare.live.com/site/en-Us/center/cleanup.htm

Thanks and Regards:

Ajay K

Microsoft Answers Support Engineer

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Hi Ajay K,

I have a closely related problem and therefore did the scannow in the sytem file checker. This returned "Windows Response Protection did not find aany integrity violations. My problem is that I used the "Open with.." button and changed a file to open with Windows Photo Viewer. This turned into a nightmare because I did not notice that the file was a .LNK file. Now all my shortcuts (.LNK files) won't work as Widows Photo Viewer is not designed to open these shortcut files.

I have an exactly similar computer and therefore looked to see which application that uses to open .LNK files and it show "Application Unknown".

I know pretty will the time that I made the "mistake" and have searched the event log. This seems to indicate that I made a change to the file bootstat.dat at that time. I could restore that file to the version which existed a few days earlier.

Would that be the right thing to do?

All the above is in Windows 7.

Regards

Mensard1

This worked for me when other proposed solutions didn't!