Desktop shortcuts

%userprofile%\desktop normally points to the path you have given.

The displayed desktop is a composite of that and

C:\Users\Public\Desktop

Had you ever relocated your desktop?

Note: if you use disk imaging routinely as tenforums members tirelessly recommend, you have a backup from which you can extract any file you like- and if you have imaged Windows (all its partitions) you can restore the whole of Windows as well should anything go wrong - from theft to badly failed upgrade or disk failure and replacement. (e.g. Macrium reflect - free/paid)

Thank you for your reply.

I suggest it depends how you created the shortcuts in the first place. Did you do it like this?

or by dragging from somewhere and dropping a shortcut?

I would never fill my desktop with shortcuts myself but have some more convenient and robust method, whether it be a folder in the start menu, favorites in a browser or some other method.

Windsurfer said:

I am using win 10 version 1809 build 17763 and Google Chrome is up to date
Version 79.0.3945.130 (Official Build) (32-bit)
I would like to know where the desktop shortcuts are stored on my computer so i can transfer them to another machine or save them so i can put them back after i do a fresh install of my operating system.
I am talking about the Desktop shortcuts and not Bookmarks.


I did copy the C:\Users\myname\Desktop folder which seems to have the shortcuts in it but when i copied that back to my new install of win 10 i lost all the shortcuts so they are obviously not in there.

ALL your Desktop shortcuts are stored in: %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch
and your taskbar shorcuts are stored under: %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch\User Pinned\taskbar

It has nothing to do with%userprofile%\desktop. Desktop.ini only contains the path of the desktop icon.

So they are Chrome specific and rely on Chrome having the same installation path- and there's a whole string of characters whose relevance is completely unknown to me.

If you had created generic Internet icons which launched the default browser, you'd have been fine.
As to Chrome, that's an issue specific to that browser.

Here's one I created from Chrome on mine:

So don't create them that way... see my screenshot. Or maybe there's some other way with Chrome- I rarely use it.

Thank you for introducing me to a peculiarity of Chrome.

By contrast, here's what you get with Firefox if you drag a selected URL to the desktop from its address bar:

- an internet shortcut, no reference to FF.