I’m occassionally called on to help out a ‘silver surfer’ when he has computer problems. Unfortunately he’s running Windows Vista and I’m still on XP so it can be a bit of a problem over the phone.

Anyway, to cut a long story short a large number of programs have ‘stopped working’, he hadn’t changed anything on the system but had received some warnings about problems installing some updates. I got the feeling that the programs were intact and it was the shortcuts in the start menu, or the start menu itself, that was playing up, possibly as a result of Windows Update, which was set to install updates automatically, installing something that caused a problem. I managed to talk him through a System Restore which seems to have resolved the issue for now and we’ve disabled automatic updates to prevent the same thing happening again but this of course prevents potentially important security fixes being installed.

I can’t find anything on the internet regarding this but was wondering whether anyone had experienced anything similar (apparently he first noticed problems on Friday). If we could identify which update was causing the problem he could install the rest.

Done a malware scan?

He’s got AVG Free installed but I could suggest a full scan. However, a system restore isn’t likely to neutralise a virus is it,unless it’s masquerading as a system file that’s replaced by the system restore?

Run Malwarebytes and see if that finds anything

That. ^^

Same problem here, the shortcuts on the start menu don’t work. Seems to have stopped a few weeks ago. The programs still work if you find the program in ‘all programs’.
I’ve had a quick look but couldn’t find any quick fix. Only see the problem on the desktop, laptop is ok, but both do the same updates, both with MSE.

Seems it’s a known problem.

http://www.winmatrix.com/forums/index.php?/topic/14341-vista-start-menu-broken/

ShellExView will let you disable Context Menu Handlers individually, then it’s trial and error till you find the cause.