Old shortcut useable after file rename?

[Guest]

Yesterday i renamed a file but did not delete the old shortcut. Today, I
must have clicked on the old shortcut in My Recent Docs without realizing,
opened file, added 1 line to what was about a 200K file (Wordpad), closed and
saved by clicking yes to save changes. It took a LONG time, so checked the
file, and it was now 49 M.
When I looked at it, the first half of the original file was there, but then
garbage (all slashes) and the last part of the file was missing, and the
break wasn't where i added the line!
I didn't think the old shortcut would have worked? What happened? Is there
anything else I should do besides copy/pasting what remains of the original
to a new file and then deleting the corrupted file? I already deleted the
old shortcut.
Thanks.

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

Yesterday i renamed a file but did not delete the old shortcut. Today, I
must have clicked on the old shortcut in My Recent Docs without realizing,
opened file, added 1 line to what was about a 200K file (Wordpad), closed and
saved by clicking yes to save changes. It took a LONG time, so checked the
file, and it was now 49 M.
When I looked at it, the first half of the original file was there, but then
garbage (all slashes) and the last part of the file was missing, and the
break wasn't where i added the line!
I didn't think the old shortcut would have worked? What happened? Is there
anything else I should do besides copy/pasting what remains of the original
to a new file and then deleting the corrupted file? I already deleted the
old shortcut.
Thanks.

Please provide full details about the problem shortcut.
Without these details any advice would be pure guesswork.

 

[Lindsay]

When you click a shortcut to a file that's been renamed or moved, it
searches for either a matching file (because you renamed it) or it tries to
find it (because you moved it). The shortcut thens updates itself for future
reference but doesn't change the shortcuts name. As for your file being
corrupted, that has nothing to do with the shortcut.

 

[Guest]

Now am worried. Just did a google search on FHYPERLINK which was the first
readable word in the corrupted file after a vertical rectangular character
and space which was followed by a url in quotes (".............") -- the URL
was a hyperlink to a medical journal article, Circulation -- , then followed
by the backward slashes (\\\\\\\\\\\) to the end of the now huge 49,868 KB
file. There was a similar question posed on the Smart Computing Q&A board
(but I'm not a subscriber so can't post). It was suggestedthere that
FHYPERLINK might indicate a virus??

The Wordpad file was one where I kept an archive of e-mails and this copy of
an e-mail had been in the rtf document for a long time. The first approx. 30
K of the file appeared to be fine, up to the rectangular symbol and
FHYPERLINK, etc., so I copy-pasted it out into 3 separate small files almost
to the last normal character in the file to save what I could. The place
where the the file started to corrupt was where that hyperlink in quotes
would have been. There were lots of hyperlinks in this file, many of which
are from PubMed (a pretty legitimate source!).

The line I added two nights ago was much further down in the file, and was
just a statement, like:
File: xxxxxxx.jpg (xxx.x KB)
as a reminder since AOL 9.0 headers don't completely copy into Wordpad.
Perhaps this is TOO much detail, but if it provides any clue, I would
appreciate the help.
You're probably right, this may have nothing to do with using an old
shortcut, but since I had never done that before...... I don't really recall,
but I thought previous Windows versions didn't allow me to use an old
shortcut, would just tell me it couldn't find the file if I clicked on an old
one.
Thanks, again.