Inconsistently failing shortcuts...

[David Darling]

Hello,

I work within a large corporation in BC housing over 3000 Windows XP
(SP1) machines on a Ethernet-based network. We're experiencing a
rather peculiar problem within one department, concerning shortcuts to
folders on servers. My attempt to explain the problem in detail to
the best of my ability follows below...

The group of users experiencing the problem (approx 12 PC's/12 users)
do not utilize mapped drives at all, instead, they access folders on
network drives via shortcuts. Shortcuts are created by various
methods, and placed within the Desktop, Quick-launch, and Favorites.
Intermittently, and without rhyme or reason, when users in this
department create shortcuts to a top level share, for example
"//server01/folder01", the shortcut will work for the first few
clicks, and suddenly the user will receive the following error message
when clicking the shortcut:

The item 'Shortcut Name' that this shortcut refers to has been
changed or moved, so this shortcut will no longer work properly.

Do you want to delete this shortcut? (buttons Yes and No are
displayed below error message)

Note this problem ONLY occurs when these shortcuts are accessed from
either the Desktop or Quick-launch. All shortcuts accessed from the
Favorites menu work %100 of the time. As well, any shortcuts not
pointing to a top level share, for example
"//server01/folder01/folder02", work %100 of the time as well.

Once the user receives the preceding error message, the shortcut will
not work until it has a change applied to it (for instance, adding a
space to the end of the path, then deleting the space, and clicking
Apply). Once this is done, the shortcut will then work again for a
couple clicks, before dying again.

This problem does not occur for all shortcuts - nor does it happen
consistently.

We don't believe this to be a server related issue, as the shortcuts
in question point to several different servers. Also, we do not
believe this to be a network related issue as we utilized a
sniffer-tool to monitor network usage both when clicking a shortcut
that works, and a shortcut that fails. When the shortcut that fails
was clicked, no data was pushed from the PC to the network (no network
traffic was visible). This leads us to believe that the problem is
related to the PC's themselves..

Troubleshooting thus far has included:

- formatting harddrive, re-installing Windows XP
- recreating profile on the machine
- disabling the Distributed Link Tracking service (a suggestion by a
third-party)
- attempting to recreate the problem under my own profile on the
clients PC - was unable to do so
- had the client login to my PC under his ID - was unable to recreate
the problem

Any input is muchly appreciated...

Thanks,

David Darling

 

[Baruch]

Hello, David:

I've had a similar problem (on a smaller scale). I am unclear what exactly
is the problem, but as far as I have been able to determine, the shortcuts
appear to try to "follow" a file if it is moved. If the file is moved, the
shortcut tries to point to it in its new location.

Try this: link a shortcut to a dummy file, and examine the shortcut's
properties. You'll see that it points to the file, as expected. Now move
the file to another folder. At this point the shortcut still points to the
old location. However, if you click in the shortcut, it finds the file and
opens it. Now if you check its properties, you'll see that it has changed
the path to the file's new location.

I'm thinking that in your case, those files or folders may be subjected to
renaming or other changes as the network itself changes. Thoughts coming to
my mind are connections made and lost, and perhaps changes in the relative
path name to the file.