Numerous Desktop Shortcuts

[depawl]

I have a business associate running XP SP2 on a Dell Dimension. He said he was just moving some files around and suddenly his desktop is full of shortcuts, literally hundreds of copies of documents. For example the shortcut’s title may be “Copy (340) of document.doc”. He said he cannot delete any of them, they just keep coming back. I suspect some type of spyware infection (he is running only Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition, no anti-spyware programs that I’m aware of). I was wondering if these symptoms are indicative of any specific infection?
Thanks.

[fink]

That isn't typically the sign of an infection. I'd be looking at other things first... like remembering what files he was moving around to try and describe exactly what was done. A system restore may also fix whatever error occured to move those icons there.

I'll move this to the XP forum for now for some more input.

[dunedin]

depawl

“Copy (340) of document.doc

.

All these extra copies is what you get when moving files if you drag them (instead of moving them) or somehow click an option from the right click menu. I think this is what he has done.

As fink says try System Restore

He will then have to move his files again, but carefully this time.

Elaine

[depawl]

I found over 4000 files in his c:\documents and settings\username\desktop folder. There were over a hundred copies each of every word and excel document from his My Documents folder. I have not idea how this happened. He obviously didn't do it intentionally and I don't see how he could have done it by mistake. I fear there something must be corrupted to have caused this. I deleted all those files (except of course his desktop icons that were there before) but I fear if it happened once it will happen again. I think that what was happening when he was trying to delete them from the desktop, he would delete a hundred or so (however many icons can fit on a desktop) but then the next hundred would just replace them, so it appeared as though they weren't being deleted. I'd be interested to know if anyone has any thoughts as to what the problem may be.
Thanks.

[SuperSparks]

Get the WinXP CD handy, then go to Start>Run and type "sfc /scannow" without the quotes (you don't get any report from the System File Checker, it just silently replaces and corrupt or missing system files that it finds). If there is something corrupted in Windows, then hopefully that will fix it.