Links in Favorites are dead

Hi, I searched but didn't see my particular problem anywhere.

A couple of days ago I went to use a link my favorites and it was dead. After checking I found they were all dead. I opened properties and where the url should be, there's the name of the link instead. (no www. or .com) I'd made no changes that I thought this. I have my favorites backed up so after running crapcleaner, spybot, adaware and my av (Avast), nothing remarkable was found, I replaced my favorites.

All seemed well. I got on my pc for the first time today and walah!!! my favorites are dead again. A dialog box comes up when I click a link that reads "The target of this Internet Shortcut is not valid. Go to the Internet Shortcut property sheet and make sure the target is correct." Same as the other day...where the url should be it is replaced with the name of the link.

Does anyone have any idea what could be causing this?

Thanks ~Jena

 

OH CRAAAAAP!! I just opened the backup zip of my favorites and the links were dead there too. So it is a bigger deal than a few minutes ago as now I must try to replace some 400+ links...ick Just thought this was worth mentioning.

~Jena

 

And.......my daughter just brought it to my attention that I had made a shortcut to a site for her on the desktop, and it also was changed. This link was never in my favorites. I had just made it earlier that day on the desktop.

Sorry for the multi posts. I must be getting old, I can't remember sh** anymore.

~Jena

 

Hi Jena,

Go to this site http://dougknox.com/ and click on the Win XP Fixes on the left hand side. Now, look for File Association Fixes and click on it.

Scroll down until you see LNK (Shortcut) File Association Fix (Restores Default Shortcut Behavior) click on it and run it.

Steve

 

Well...I followed your instructions. But it didn't fix anything. I replaced my favorites earlier this evening (between my first couple posts) with the zip I made a couple of days ago after fixing my favorites the first time. And since the favs I saved were dead they probably can't be repaired right?

Do you have any idea why this happened? Was it something I did? Would system restore help ya think? Now I don't want follow through with any of my ideas first since I screwed up this one. lol

Thanks for taking time to help...
~Jena

 

If you have a good restore point I would certainly try it. Hopefully, it can go back far enough before this started.

Spyware is the first thing that comes to mind as a possible cause. After running system restore, I would go thru some of the malware steps in the link below and see if anything turns up.

http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=35407

Steve