Broken-Shortcuts on Anything About IT

Windows 8 – Scheduled Maintenance Task won’t delete Desktop Shortcuts anymore

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 20:28:04 +0000

On Windows 7 many users suffer from disappearing shortcuts on their desktop. I wrote about this in Control Windows 7 Scheduled Maintenance Behavior Through Group Policy. On Windows 8 this shouldn’t happen anymore, since Microsoft has removed the related scripts and Tasks from the Diagnosis troubleshooting pack (DiagPackage.diagpkg)

The following files have been removed from the C:\Windows\diagnostics\scheduled\Maintenance folder:

RS_RemoveShortcuts.ps1
RS_RemoveUnusedDesktopIcons.ps1
TS_BrokenShortcuts.ps1
TS_UnusedDesktopIcons.ps1

Control Windows 7 Scheduled Maintenance Behavior Through Group Policy

Sun, 07 Nov 2010 15:35:23 +0000

This week one of my customers send me the Microsoft support article KB978980 – Desktop Shortcuts disappear in Windows 7 and the request to make sure this wouldn’t happen to his clients. In short, if a user creates a shortcut that points to a location that isn’t available at the time when the weekly scheduled system maintenance task is running, the shortcuts are considered as broken and therefore automatically deleted.

In the support article Microsoft doesn’t really provide a fix to solve this problem but rather describes 2 workarounds that don’t sound feasible to me.