Last Updated on September 30, 2010 by Dave Farquhar
Dave,
A friend of mine who uses Win98 has an irksome problem I don’t quite understand. Maybe you can shed some light on the matter.Whenever he boots up, all the launch keyboard shortcuts defined in his desktop icon shortcuts are gone. He can manually select each one and redefine them (O for Outlook, W for Word and so on), but the next time he starts up (reboots), they’re all gone again.
These are stored in registry…?
/ Bo
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Bo Leuf
Leuf fc3 Consultancy
http://www.leuf.com/
I’ve seen that problem in 95, 98, and NT4. It appears that if Windows Explorer is the currently active application, they’ll work, but if some other app has focus, keyboard shortcuts on desktop icons won’t work. The only workaround I’ve found for this is to store keyboard shortcuts in the start menu. Those seem to work all the time.
I don’t think they’re stored in the registry, but I’m not sure where they’re stored. Win3.x had keyboard shortcuts too. If I had to hazzard a guess, I’d say they’re probably stored in the shortcut files in 9x/NT and in the program group files in Win3.x.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.