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Very Odd shortcut behavior !!!

Submitted by Tim Clark on February 23, 2007 - 5:06pm

I have a created a short cut on my flash drive in the root Dir:

PStart[Home]
"H:\Documents\NonU3Apps\PStart\PStart.exe"

realizing that this would only work on my Home machine.

I plugged the drive into my machine at work.

The drive became "K:" as was expected.

I double clicked on the shortcut, expecting an error.
It was my intent to creat a new shortcut for the work machine.

I received NO ERROR. PStart launched as normal!!!
The shortcut CHANGED TO:
"H:\Documents\NonU3Apps\PStart\PStart.exe"

I tried this on another machine.
The drive became "G:"
I double clicked on the shortcut
I received NO ERROR. PStart launched as normal!!!
The shortcut CHANGED TO:
"G:\Documents\NonU3Apps\PStart\PStart.exe"

As wonderful as this is, I thought this was not supposed to happen.
What's Up?
All 3 machines are Windows XP pro fully patched.

Any ideas?

Tim

( categories:

General Discussion

)

Windows XP Pro tries to fix

JJDafoe - February 23, 2007 - 5:38pm

Windows XP Pro tries to fix invalid shortcuts if it can... it's a feature that has it's pluses and it's drawbacks. I don't know if other versions of XP or Vista have this feature or not.

Yeah, XP and probably 2000

Bahamut - February 23, 2007 - 10:08pm

Yeah, XP and probably 2000 simply replace the original drive letter with the one that holds the shortcut if it can't access the absolute path.

(Boring.)

But, but, but...

Tim Clark - February 24, 2007 - 3:44pm

Please understand,

I do know that Windows can try to fix broken shortcuts.
But I thought that it basically asked you.

Something like, "This shortcut is invalid/not found do you want me to try to search for the program?". You say yes and it searches for the program and fixes the shortcut if it finds it.

This JUST DID IT!! No questions, no fuss, no muss.
Click shortcut, program launches, shortcut fixed.

I recall reading at different times in the forums about the problems with shortcuts because you could not have "relative paths [or something like that] without special utilities.

I really thought this was supposed to be a problem?

Feedback please?

Tim

"freenode, it's Not as Free as it used to be, Free as in Freedom"

Windows will only replace

Bahamut - February 25, 2007 - 3:33am

Windows will only replace the drive letter; it won't look in any other directories.

The only problem I can see in my situation is that the shortcut would be edited/rewritten everytime I changed machines and this could cause wear and tear on the sectors of the flash [you know what I'm talking about].
A byte or two every time you change drive letters is nothing. FxP does a lot of writing to fix absolute filepaths when the drive letter changes.

(Boring.)