I do not know how this happened but there is a folder called "Programs" in "All Programs". The content of the "Programs" folder is a duplicate of what are in the "All Programs" except "Programs" folder.
How can I get rid of this duplicate?
This happend to me once, i ended up taking months to sort it all out only to find that id made the problem worse.
its a reccuring problem where the Programs folder's attributes are changed/overwritten when you install a new program that installs stuff to the start menu.
As soon as it happens, a restart usually fixes it since it will rewrite all of the dekstop.ini's etc.
Brink,
Thanks for your response.
I followed the instructions and all short-cuts and program folders except that for the programs I installed, were restored.
In the STEP One - 8 and the STEP TWO - 11, I am supposed to copy all I want but there was no short-cuts or program folders for the third party application softwares installed.
I wonder what I did wrong.
These will only be for the default shortcuts included with Vista. You will need to manually create new shortcuts for any shortcuts that you have added or for 3rd party programs that you have since installed, and add them back.
The programs will still be installed at the C:\Program Files location though.
That means pains-taking way is the only way to recover short-cuts for other programs. I can identify fairly easily one file for each apps for which to make short-cut. The problem is that each short-cut folder usually contains more than one short-cut so that it would be difficult to restore all those originally there.
I will try but I may end up restoring whole system from its backup system image.
Thanks for your help anyway.
If there are not to many of them, then it should be the EXE file you would use to create the shortcut from in the C:\Program Files\(programs's folder) folder. To be sure it is it, you can double click on it to see if that opens the program.
If there a lot of them, then restoring the system image may save you some time.
There were indeed a lot of application softwares installed and I chose to restore the system from its backup. There were a couple of softwares which were not in the backup so that I had to re-install them. This incidence told me that I need keep the system backup updated.
