Windows 10: PC spontaneously creates shortcuts to a favorites file

Several times now over the past few months when my computer boots up or sometimes even spontaneously when it's already running one single file a DuckDuckGo bookmarks.html file reproduces many times and keeps reproducing very fast until I do a hard shutdown and reboot again. It can make 500+ copies of the file within a minute or two and keeps going until I stop it by shutting down. I have run both Avast Free Antivirus and MalWareBytes free and neither found a virus. I looked in the Event Viewer and found several bunches of a report quoted below I don't see a way to a

:)

 

Creating Shortcuts with Batch File

Tried both of the VB Scripts that you provided and adding the 9 switch to the batch file but neither was able to create a shortcut to my desktop.

 

Creating Shortcuts with Batch File

I've created a Batch file which calls on the following VB Script to be able to create a shortcut to my desktop:

VB Script (named createLink.vbs):
Code: set objWSHShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell") set objFso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject") ' command line arguments ' TODO: error checking sShortcut = objWSHShell.ExpandEnvironmentStrings(WScript.Arguments.Item(0)) sTargetPath = objWSHShell.ExpandEnvironmentStrings(WScript.Arguments.Item(1)) sWorkingDirectory = objFso.GetAbsolutePathName(sShortcut) set objSC = objWSHShell.CreateShortcut(sShortcut) objSC.TargetPath = sTargetPath objSC.WorkingDirectory = sWorkingDirectory objSC.Save[/quote] Batch File Example (for Windows Notepad):
Code: @Echo off cscript createLink.vbs "C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop\Notepad.lnk" "C:\Windows\System32\notepad.exe"[/quote] But after creating the shortcut using this method, I'm not able to assign a custom icon for the shortcut. I get the following error message when trying to do so:





Any help and ideas on what I need to put into the VB Script and/or Batch File to be able to do this would be greatly appreciated! *Big Grin

Also, I know that I can simply do this by going to Start Menu\All Programs\Accessories\ right-clicking on Notepad and selecting Send to\Desktop (create shortcut). Easy enough for creating a single shortcut. But I need to create several multiple shortcuts and using this Batch/VBS method would really save me a lot of time in doing so.

 

Creating Shortcuts with Batch File

Hmm, I just tried it and it worked fine. Maybe try running the batch as administrator? Also, right click on the desktop after the shortcut is created and click Refresh.

If the file in the third parameter doesn't exist, it assumes the icon is in the application.