Windows 10: Shortcut Arrow Icon - Change, Remove, or Restore in Windows 10  

Brink said:

You're welcome Rene.

The download in step 2 of OPTION ONE in this tutorial works well.

It worked! Thank you!

It did not catch 3 shortcut arrows on the left monitor and 4 on the right monitor, but it got all the others.

I'm going to set a new restore point, then shut down, then start cold...and perhaps that will get the others. Thanks again.

Okay, Brink...

I shut down, started cold, and all came up okay. Now there are 6 remaining shortcut arrows on the left monitor and still 4 on the right.

I can live with that.

Thank you for your assistance.

They are all "Pinned Site Shortcut".

Uh, oh. There's trouble in River City...

Using the .reg hack from OPTION ONE to remove the arrow overlay on shortcuts has some nasty side-effects:

It disables WinX (displaying the Power Menu via the <"Windows Key"+X> or <right-clicking> on the Start icon in the taskbar.)

But, wait, there's more!

On my notebook (clean install of Win10 Home x64), but not on my desktop (upgrade from Win8.1 Pro x64 to Win10 Pro x64) it also prevents pinning shortcuts to the taskbar. I can drag an icon to the taskbar and the "pin to taskbar" pop appears at the cursor, but the icon never gets pinned.

However, the good news is that the alternate method of removing the arrow overlays -- using the Blank.ico file -- doesn't interfere with either WinX or pinning shortcuts to the taskbar.

Maybe it's something unique to my systems?

Brink said:

Ok. We're just going to go back to the transparent icon method that will work without any side effects other than a transparent outline on the overlay with large icons on desktop.

1. What is "transparent icon method"?
2. How do I accomplish it?
3. Will it then apply to future URL links I pin to the desktop?