I ran into a problem on a PC a few months ago and have really now got to look at (partly because I thought it was due to a failing stick of RAM that was causing BSODs).
My PC runs Windows 7 x64
When I remote desktop to this PC, I noticed some of the shortcuts in my taskbar didn't work, specifically:
- Explorer: "Can't open this item. It may have been moved, deleted..." etc
- Visual Studio 2013: "A problem occurred... ...To fix run devenv.exe /resetsettings"
- SSMS 2012: "Exception has been thrown by the target of the invocation"
Other shortcuts seem fine (e.g. Excel, Outlook, IE, Chrome, Firefox, Notepad++, LINQPad)
When I navigate to the actual program files (e.g. devenv.exe) and run them, the same error occurs.
So I've focused on explorer. If I run explorer.exe in the Run prompt it works. If I run the shortcut property "%windir%/explorer.exe" it says that it cannot be found. If I run "%windir%" in explorer or the Run prompt, it says it can't find it.
So I'm wondering if %windir% is the problem (for instance, do SSMS and VS have files that they refer to that use that environment variable)?
However, if I set %windir% after it disappears, the problem with starting VS and SSMS, and Explorer from the taskbar persist. So I am not sure that %windir% is the problem.
The problem is not just when connected over remote desktop. Once I have remoted to that PC, when I later return to it in person, it still has the problem. Only a log off and log on fixes it.
Any thoughts would be most appreciated.
