Four ways to restore desktop shortcuts

At some point, a user of the Windows operating system may find that all the icons or, as they are also called, shortcuts have disappeared on the computer’s desktop. There are many reasons for this. In this article, we will try to figure out how to restore desktop shortcuts. As a result, four different methods will be presented to eliminate the problem posed.

Method 1: how to recover a deleted shortcut?

Perhaps this is the easiest way to restore desktop icons, but it may not be effective in all cases, but only if they were deleted directly by the user. So here is what you need to do for this:

1. Open the Trash. If its shortcut also disappeared from the desktop, you can do it like this: press Win + R, enter the shell: RecycleBinFolder command in the window that appears, click OK.
2. In the window that appears, you should find all the deleted shortcuts. Select all the items you need to restore.
3. Click on the “Restore selected objects” button on the top panel.

After that, they should appear again on the desktop. If they are not in the Trash folder, then go to the next method, how to restore shortcuts on the desktop.

Method 2: Display Icons

It happens that, by and large, there are no problems. This happens when the user simply turned off the display of icons on the main screen. It turns out that they all remained in place, just became invisible. By the way, you can verify this by trying to select the area of ​​the desktop, holding LMB and pulling the mouse. If the selection area does not appear, then this is the reason. In this case, here's what you need to do:

1. Click RMB anywhere on the screen.
2. In the menu, hover over the item "View".
3. In the additional menu, select "Display Icons."

After that they should appear. This was the second way to restore desktop shortcuts, and it also may not always help, so move on to the next one.

Method 3: launch explorer.exe

There may be no icons due to the termination of the explorer.exe process, which is necessary to display almost all interface elements. To correct the situation, you need to do the following:

1. Open the "Task Manager" window by pressing Ctrl + Shift + Esc on the keyboard.
2. In the window that opens, click the "File" button and in the context menu click on "New Task".
3. In the window that appears, enter explorer.exe.
4. Click on the OK button.

The process will be launched, accordingly, all elements of the desktop, including shortcuts, will be displayed. This method, how to restore the shortcut on the desktop, is also not considered to be 100% effective, but it's still worth trying.

Method 4: make changes to the registry

Using the previous method, it is not always possible to restore the process of explorer.exe. In this case, you must resort to making adjustments to the Windows registry.

1. Open the registry by pressing Win + R and running the regedit command.
2. In the folder tree on the left, open HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE and go to SOFTWARE.
3. In the folder that opens, go to the Microsoft directory, and then to WindowsNT.
4. In it, open CurrentVersion, and then Image File Execution Options.
5. Find explorer.exe or iexplorer.exe in the opened directory tree and delete them. To do this, click on the name of RMB and select the appropriate item in the menu.

After that, you will need to restart the computer for all the changes to take effect. Thus, after starting the desktop, the missing elements should appear on it. So you have learned the fourth method, how to restore program shortcuts. If this does not help you, then there are only two options: check the computer for viruses, it is possible that they hinder the display of icons, or roll back the system until the problem has appeared.

We hope this article helped you resolve problems that occurred while working in the Windows operating system. If none of the methods helped, then we recommend thinking about reinstalling the system.