Recently, without a reason, my entire start menu got cleared. All shortcuts within C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu and the C:\Users\<user name>\…\Start Menu got deleted. Being the intelligent man I am I instantly thought “OH I BETTER START RECREATING THESE NOW!” So I did. Sadly, when I realized I should have downloaded an undelete program I had already overwritten those sectors on my hard drive.
In order to recover my deleted start menu icons I wrote an application in C# to help. It scans the various “Program Files” directories (or any others you specify) for .exe files and presents them in a list. You select the files you want and edit the default folder/name options and press “add selected” and the program automatically creates all the folders and short cuts in the start menu.
This application only works with Windows Vista.
In case anyone else runs into this problem, the app can be downloaded below.
