Strange Shortcut problem

[paul]

I have a weird problem which has just started happening as of last Thursday, staff are reporting desktop shortcuts to OWA and IE are not working, when you double click the OWA shortcut this loads up a printer dialogue!? IE presents the following error:

Windows could not create the shortcut. Check to see if the disk is full.

This is only happening on a small number of clients all staff share the same mandatory profile the majority of which are fine.

[Michael]

That is really strange. Does re-creating new shortcuts fix the problem?

[paul]

Nope makes no difference.

[Michael]

A quick google points at the user profile. The user cannot do anything because they don't have any permissions. To confirm this, can you logon as an administrator on the workstation and perform the same tasks?

[paul]

it gets stranger logged on as a admin when I click IE on desktop it creates a shortcut to itself!???? Seems to also be appearing on more machines no sign of a virus/adaware sophos is not reporting anything.

[Michael]

This behaviour happens when you've installed IE7 and haven't rebooted. Rebooting should cure the problem!

[paul]

machines have had IE 7 on them for yonks

[kennysarmy]

I am now getting this issue...

Was there any ever a fix?
Re-install of IE7 made no difference.

If you check the file associations:
Tools-> Folder Options -> File Types
Intenet Shortcut entries appear to the be the same as on a working PC...



Regards

[Michael]

What about if you install IE8 or using an alternative browser like FF? I wonder if it's the registry which is corrupted or that a DLL isn't being registered correctly. Usually a repair/re-install should fix this.

What about loading IE without any add-ons (right click the shortcut).

[kennysarmy]

Uninstalling SOPHOS the issue goes away...
Reinstalling SOPHOS the issue returns..

This currently is only affecting a handful of pc's.

The fix from SOPHOS is to delete the entry in reg key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows\AppInit_DLLs

Which was : "C:\PROGRA~1\Sophos\SOPHOS~1\SOPHOS~1.DLL"

I am awaiting a call back to see if this is the comlete fix or a fudge for now.

Regards.