All of a sudden icons disappeared from redirected shortcuts on our Windows 11 clients

[Hoyt]

Howdy all,

 

Got a weird one for you.  Our staff all have redirected Desktops with shortcuts on them and basically no start menus other than the bare necessities.  It's worked great for us for almost twenty years.  Of course Windows 11 is doing all it can to torpedo that.

 

All of a sudden all the shortcuts on the Windows 11 PCs redirected Desktops have no icons on them.  The shortcuts still work, but it makes it awful hard to find what you are looking for without the icons.  The few Windows 10 PCs we still have do not have this problem, even when logged into the same accounts that we use on the Windows 11 PCs.

 

As a test I copied new shortcuts to the redirected Desktops and the icons never showed up.  If I view that redirected Desktop from a Windows 10 PC the icons are there.  I did copy new shortcuts from a Windows 11 PC.  I even went to the properties of a shortcut and went to change the icon and selected the specific .dll file that the original referenced and picked the proper icon but it still shows up as blank.

 

Has anyone out there experienced this?  I realize not everyone uses redirected Desktops but I thought I'd ask.

[J-14P]

Are the icons being sourced from the network? iirc Windows 11 doesn't allow shortcuts to have icons sourced from a network location anymore. I had some issues with this and ended up having to have a GPO that copies the shortcuts from the network on logon to the local drive.

 

Think there was possibly a GPO to allow it to work again.

Edited April 23 by J-14P

[Hoyt]

Quote

Are the icons being sourced from the network?

They are and have been working fine until today.  I forgot to mention that we have other areas set up the same way and they are working fine.  It's only one area that has the shortcuts redirected to a specific server that is having the issue.

 

I'm thinking of requesting permission to reboot the file server, but usually a power outage is about the only approved time for the servers to reboot.

 

Quote

irc Windows 11 doesn't allow shortcuts to have icons sourced from a network location anymore.

 

Do you recall when this change happened?

 

Thanks for your reply.

[J-14P]

I had the issue from day 1 of Windows 11 testing, so not sure why it is only affecting you now.

[pablo007]

we had this problem on redirected start menus just this week, and had to remake all our shortcuts,wierdly it then worked fine, as it has been for years on windows 11.

[Rob_D]

Shortcuts with icons on a network share works fine here.

I remember a bit of permissions tweaking when we first moved to win11, but with the icons in the same share as the redirected desktops it all seems to work okay for us, right now at least.

[J-14P]

How strange, not sure why it never worked for me? Didn't have many shortcuts so not an issue.

[Hoyt]

We've had similar happenings like Rob said.  Had to add a group to the security tab of the share and all has been well for ages.

 

I tried recreating the shortcuts but no joy so far.

[pablo007]

Apologies, i did not give you our full fix we had to create a new folder in the same location as the previous one and then recreate the shortcuts inside that and it worked(copying the previous broken shortcuts did not), wierd and unexplainable i know but I promise you it worked for us  we had a backup of the shortcuts folder and restoring that elsewhere and then drag and dropping into new folder worked on some and saved us a little time but we still had to redo the majority of them.

Edited April 24 by pablo007

[Hoyt]

Quote

we had to create a new folder in the same location as the previous one and then recreate the shortcuts inside that

Interesting.  So you basically recreated the root share folder and copied the shortcuts and subfolders back into it?  I hope this is the case, because we have forty or fifty subfolders with one folder each (Desktop) in each one, and a couple of dozen root shares.

 

I'm hoping that maybe recreating and re-sharing the root share and copying everything back into them will do it.  I'll have to break a lot of connections because most of our staff never log off, but it'll be worth a shot.

 

Thanks for your explanation!

[Hoyt]

Just a follow up when I uninstalled the security update listed as KB5083769 the icons on the shortcuts came back.  I have no idea why this one server is the only one affected though.

[pablo007]

On 24/04/2026 at 13:57, Hoyt said:

Interesting.  So you basically recreated the root share folder and copied the shortcuts and subfolders back into it?  I hope this is the case, because we have forty or fifty subfolders with one folder each (Desktop) in each one, and a couple of dozen root shares.

 

I'm hoping that maybe recreating and re-sharing the root share and copying everything back into them will do it.  I'll have to break a lot of connections because most of our staff never log off, but it'll be worth a shot.

 

Thanks for your explanation!

Unfortunately not we had to recreate the majority at every sublevel as well. We haven't seen the results of removing KB5083769 yet as we worked around it but it would be just like M$ to introduce 10 fixes and 11 breakages..

[Hoyt]

Found a GPO here that fixes the problem, just gotta figure out where to put it in our twenty year old policy structure.

 

Blank Network Icons:

• Enable Group Policy: Open gpedit.msc, navigate to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > File Explorer, and enable "Allow the use of remote paths in file shortcut icons". Run gpupdate /force in CMD afterward.

[gaz350b]

Seen the issue here weirdly only happening on Staff at our primary and students at the college, 6th form seems fine.

[gaz350b]

Can confirm this setting has fixed it here.

[Jawloms]

On 30/04/2026 at 20:54, Hoyt said:

Found a GPO here that fixes the problem, just gotta figure out where to put it in our twenty year old policy structure.

 

Blank Network Icons:

• Enable Group Policy: Open gpedit.msc, navigate to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > File Explorer, and enable "Allow the use of remote paths in file shortcut icons". Run gpupdate /force in CMD afterward.

I don't have that registry setting set, but have no problem with the icons on a redirected desktop.........

[gaz350b]

3 hours ago, Jawloms said:

I don't have that registry setting set, but have no problem with the icons on a redirected desktop.........

Weird thing it only effects certain network shares and not all. We have 3 schools and staff and student start menus at each but only 2.