Vista Start Menu Weirdness

Bluefrog

Hi,

Having a weird problem and wondering if anyone else had it and found a workaround.

I did an upgrade as part of the Dell Express Upgrade from XP Professional to Vista Business on an Inspiron 9400 with 2GB RAM. Only problems I had were file permission issues which were fairly easily sorted and a soundcard crackling which the latest drivers seem to have more or less sorted out - apparently there was a conflict with the wireless card - go figure.

Anyway, the issue here concerns not alonw my Start Menu but also some other locations as well. The problem is that while some of my program shortcuts work fine, others when clicked don't launch the program or seem to do anything at all - clicking doesn't even seem to produce any disk activity. Obviously this is most obvious in my Start menu but also happens a couple of programs in my quicklaunch and in various other locations.

I have tried changing permission on the shortcut, on the executable it points to all to no avail. A number of applications are affected by this including but not limited to programs as diverse as Skype (not installed before the upgrade), Dreamweaver, and even some of the applets in the control panel consoles.

While the programs won't start from the program favourites area in the start menu, they will open if I drill down through the folders and search for the shortcut to the executable. I have looked for differences between the 2 shortcuts but there are none. The issue seems to be location based but only affects some programs.

Save clean installing, which would be painful to say the least, has anyone got a fix for this or is anyone even experiencing the same issue? Could find nothing else about it online.

Lord Derpington

This all sounds fairly strange.
Have you tried making new shortcuts to the excutable that works on the desktops and see if they work, there may not be any difference in the files on the surface but perhaps vista is just picky..

ethernet

I did a clean install at work [dual boot with XP actually as HP won't write a driver for scanner].

The only thing I can thing of is drive letters getting mixed up. You hardly created any new partitions though seeing as you did an upgrade. It's too much work sorting this out manually, IMO. I hate to say it, but a clean install might be best.

Soundman

Had this problem myself. Couldn't find a definite answer so just re-created the shortcuts into the Start Menu folder.

Bluefrog

I'm liking soundman's idea better but given that Skype was installed after the upgrade I'm not confident of it working.

I suspect the reason that there isn't much out there on this problem is that it's a hard one to describe and it's possible to 'get around'.

8T8

Have you tried turning off UAC ?

Bluefrog

Actually Skype was the main problem. In the end I uninstalled it and reinstalled - seemed to fox the issue.