[1809, ou] Start Menu tiles break when shortuct link path changes

[smarties11]

Hi,

 

We've been redirecting the Start Menu to a network location and then using a layout XML to customise the tile layout for around a year now and it has worked really well without any problems.

 

However, today I noticed an issue. One of the tiles on our start menu is a shortcut to an internal claim form. The path to this form has changed. I updated the shortcut in the redirected Start Menu (no need to update the layout XML as it just points to the shortcut lnk file) and now when an existing user logs on, the tile for that item is broken. The icon disappears and the text W~Microsoft.AutoGenerated appears with a random GUID at the end instead of the shortcut name. If you delete the users local profile then it works fine, as does a new user.

 

So it seems that Windows must cache the tile data somewhere. Any ideas where this might be? I can get around it easily enough by renaming the shortcut and then pointing the layout XML to the new shortcut instead but this seems a bit silly?

 

Thanks!

[BOOT]

Tile data is stored either in the registry or a CloudStore.dat file.. or both. Depends on whether you're using local or roaming profiles.Updating the layout XML file or giving it a new last-modified date usually resets the broken tiles.

[smarties11]

Thanks for your reply. I had assumed it was using a new name for the shortcut that kicked things into life but it does make sense that it was because the XML has a newer timestamp. The next time this affects us I will just re-save the XML to update the timestamp and see if that fixes it. This is quick enough and easy enough to do without having to worry about the cache.

 

Appreciate your time!