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XP's done it to me again

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5 replies

by shaung411

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I'll start by explaining the senario first. I was upgrading XP home to XP pro on a sony laptop. When the install was finished the screen resolution was set by default to 640x480-16 colors because XP couldn't find the driver for the LCD. I went into the start menu to get to my sony driver recovery program, and as soon as the All Programs opened, I got a baloon error message that went away before I could read it all. It basically said something about my start menu was too big for the display'sresolution setting...and that's about as far into the message I could read before it went away.

Now the problem: It cut my start menu to nothing. All the icons I had in there are GONE. This is under start > all programs. I used to have everything in there and now I have 8 choices. How can I recover the rest of my Icons.

Good luck with this one, I cannot find any references to this in Help, TechNet, or microsoft's solution base.

(ps. they aren't under any other user's start menu either including administrator.)

5 replies

by nettek

This is a known XP issue. Refer to KB article Q312369.

Unfortunately, Microsoft's solutions are meant to be implemented BEFORE upgrading (it figures, right?).

Looks like you'll manually have to recreate them. Refer to KB article Q279767 for how to manipulate the start menu.

Good luck.

by shaung411

yup that's me in the first KB article, OEM install of XP home upgraded to XP Pro. didn't delete that stupid text file first... I was hoping to find out about an automated utility to re-populate the start menu.................

by saihib

The Start menu is basically a bunch of shortcuts. You should be able to find the program you're looking for in Explorer. Once the correct driver is installed and you recover your screen resolution your start menu items should still be there.

by shaung411

not much help but thanks. I installed the right drivers and changed the resolution back but it's all gone permanently. I can still find all the apps in Explorer it's just a pain in the butt!

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