Program Icons Missing in Administrative Tools

[Peggy A]

On a client's computer running Win XP Media Center Edition, SP3, when I go to
Control Panel and Open the Administrative Tools group, there are only 2
programs showing up instead of the normal 10 programs. In particular, I was
looking for the event viewer to see if there was any information regarding a
recent blue screen event. I believe that the only programs showing were the
MS .NET Framework and Component Services.

Does anyone have any idea idea why the other programs are missing? Would
this be indicative of a bad or corrupted installation of Windows? Can this be
repaired in some way without having to wipe the PC or do a full reinstall of
Windows?

Thanks for any help.

 

[Tim Meddick]

First check to see if they [shortcuts] exist in the folder they should be.
Go to:

Cocuments and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Administrative Tools

If they are not there - Everything in the Admin Tools folder (with the
exception of Data Sources (ODBC)) is actually a shortcut to a .msc file
located in your "C:\WINDOWS\system32" directory.

Do a 'find files and folders' search for all files of type 'Microsoft Common
Console Documents' (or type *.msc in the 'all or part of the filename' box).
In the list of results, when finished searching, create a shortcut for the
ones you want and cut and paste each shortcut over to the open Admin Tools
folder (mentioned above).
The filenames are, unfortunately, not very friendly and you are going to
have to open each to find out what it does to be able to give it a more
relevant name. For instance the 'Device Manager' .msc file in the system32
folder is called devmangr.msc; so rename it 'Device Manager' and 'Event
Viewer' is called eventvwr.msc so rename it 'Event Viewer' and so on...
Hope this helps you.