Windows 10: Search bar broken, desktop shortcuts position rolled back, some applications broken

Hi all! Recently 1/9/25 I was attempting to rice my windows 11 pc. I installed GlazeWM and Zebar but the zebar broke shortly after customizing it. After I restarted my computer to attempt a fix, I noticed my desktop shortcuts had rolled back to the original location instead of where I had moved them to. I moved them and restarted once again and they did not roll back again. I then noticed that my windows search bar was not working at all. Finally after reopening zebar, I noticed it was using only 20mb of memory and still not displaying anything. I know that these outside applications will r

:)

 

Broken Website Icons On Desktop

Hi Folks, For some reason all of my desktop shortcuts that point to websites have broken. When I double click on any one of them I get this:

I’m running Win10 version 22H2 – 19045.2604, browser is Chrome, and default search engine is Google. When I right-click a broken icon and select Properties, in the Target Window I get this: "C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome_proxy.exe" --profile-directory=Default --app-id=biegcdpmmfiojiijocmlmlkchbcedeoi. The alphabet soup at the end changes from Icon to Icon but all go to the same screen above. More frustratingly, when I go to a website that used to connect with one of the broken icons and try to create a new shortcut using the “create shortcut” tool in Chrome it creates a new shortcut but it too is broken, going to the same screen as above. Any suggestions on how I can restore these shortcuts, or just be able to make new ones, would be greatly appreciated.

 

False positive for desktop shortcut scanner.lnk

The 1.239.488.0 virus / spyware definition update that rolled out about 24 hours ago appears to be producing a false positive for any shortcut placed on the desktop called "Scanner.lnk". I can consistently replicate a false positive for Trojan:Win32/FakeSysdef
with the following steps.

• Create a shortcut to an exe file.
• Place the shortcut on the desktop.
• Name the shortcut "Scanner".
• Run "Quick Scan".

I don't get the same result by directly scanning the file, nor by uploading the file to www.virustotal.com, so it would appear this is as a result of a heuristic rather than a file content analysis. I also don't get the same result with a shortcut that links
to a website.

Can anyone else replicate? How can we go about getting the Windows Defender team to reconsider this heuristic? It's a bit heavy-handed.

 

my search bar is broken

Using step 3 in the tutorial below to "Turn Off Search online and include web results from Bing" should fix the broken search in Windows 10. *Smile

Turn On or Off Search online and include web results in Windows 10