Bad Start Menu buttons

[sierrajohn2]

I have a customer's Windows XP Pro machine that shows the "Search" and "Help and Support" buttons on the start menu BUT when you click on either of them, a message is displayed saying "Windows can not create a shortcut here. Do you want the shortcut to be placed on the desktop instead?" Say What?
Help, ... anyone?

[DonRayner]

I seem to remember something about this awhile back being caused by some sort of malware. I bet if you check you will find that the run function isn't working either.

I did some googling and found a suggestion to re-register the following dll's.

shell32.dll
shdocvw.dll

If that doesn't work try to restore the system back to a point where the problem didn't exist or perform a repair install of the OS.

Hope this helps
Don

[NeoPa]

... and make sure the PC leaves you with decent, up-to-date malware protection on it. There are various freebies around, of pretty decent quality.

[sierrajohn2]

Bad Start Menu Buttons

I seem to remember something about this awhile back being caused by some sort of malware. I bet if you check you will find that the run function isn't working either.

I did some googling and found a suggestion to re-register the following dll's.

shell32.dll
shdocvw.dll

If that doesn't work try to restore the system back to a point where the problem didn't exist or perform a repair install of the OS.

Hope this helps
Don

Don,

I tried re-registering the two dll's that you suggested and the second one would NOT re-register. The error message (error number 0x.... etc.) that came up had two solutions. One was VERY involved (about 30-40 complex steps) and the second solution was to do an "over install repair of the OS", which is my current choice because of other problems with the system.

Just as an added note, this WAS cased by some malware that got into the system via a USB flash card when the owner tried to delete some files on the flash drive using windows explorer. The anti-threat software that he had on the system stopped the malware, but not fast enough (It was like a bomb going off!) to stop all of the damage. The software is By ESET and is called NOD32.

Thanks, for you answer as I'll keep the re-register the dll files in my solution library for future problems.

Thanks,

John

[sierrajohn2]

... and make sure the PC leaves you with decent, up-to-date malware protection on it. There are various freebies around, of pretty decent quality.

Thanks, but the system already had/has anti-malware on it. The anti-threat software that he had on the system stopped the malware, but not fast enough (It was like a bomb going off!) to stop all of the damage. The software is By ESET and is called NOD32.

John

[NeoPa]

Thanks for the updates.

I find an overinstall generally works pretty well, without causing too much disruption to the user's usual working environment.

[DonRayner]

You're welcome John, thanks for keeping us updated with your findings. At least SP3 is fairly recent so you won't be spending too much time performing updates.