Corrupt shortcut icons: riddle me this...

I have seen this issue before, with Vista, but now with Win7, this thing has gotten ridiculous. Here is the issue: I like to keep my Start Menu tidy, by creating a (long-established, over several years) certain hierarchy of menu items. One part of that is that I have all major applications in a submenu called "Applications". So, after I install an application, which usually just throws its start menu icons into a submenu right on the top level of the start menu, I move the submenu of the application into my "Applications" subfolder. Actually, after some weird experiences with this in Vista, what I do is copy the original menu of the applications, then paste it into my "Applications" folder, then delete the original menu, see below...

So far so good. Now enter my installation yesterday of MS Office on a brand-new Windows 7 machine. So, I follow the approach I just described, and everything looks fine. Then, at some point (probably after a re-boot), I look at the start menu icons for the Office programs, and it turns out the icon for Outlook is corrupt, and does not show the correct bitmap, but instead the generic Windows one. Clicking on the icon still works fine, but there's no way to get the icon to appear correctly. Note that this is one of these namespace shortcuts, that has the options for "Open File Location" and "Change Icon" greyed out. Oh, and I know that I could just create my own shortcut, but I'd really like to understand why in the world this can happen. It gets weirder still. I then performed an Office Repair to get the old menu back, and, low and behold, with the old menu back, my new menu also now shows the correct icon! Here are my thoughts/questions:

- I checked that the copy of the shortcut I made is a real file copy, not one of these fancy shell folder objects, or something weird: If I open a command prompt and list the folder contents, it does show the exact same lnk file for both menus. So, it looks I have two identical lnk files, but one sometimes shows an icon (when the other is present) and sometimes it doesn't.
- I had used the exact same approach on my Vista installation, and did not have these issues. What changed in Windows 7?
- I just noticed that the same issue exists for the icons of QuickTime and its Picture Viewer.

Like I said, this is clearly not a life-or-death issue, but it is really puzzling. It would be great if anybody in here could shed some light on this.

 

Try and clear the icon cache and then reboot

 

Ah yes, I forgot to mention that: The icon cache gets in the way of this as well: It's once the cache is cleared that the corrupt icons show up.

 

Hmm, ive tried something like this before.. I think it was my "C:\Windows\Installer" folder that somehow got cleared and that messed up a bunch of apps, incl. Office. Im not certain though.

 

Yes, some of these non-standard shortcuts do link to that folder. However, when I copy the actual shortcuts from one place to another, I never touch that Installer folder, so I simply cannot see why this is happening.

Just to clarify, I am really more interested in an explanation, and obtaining an understanding of what is going on here, than I am in a solution. There's straightforward-enough solutions available, like simply creating a normal shortcut to the executable in question. But maybe I am attempting to dive too deep into the hidden mysteries of Windows with this request...

As an aside, however, I do like to comment that the person at Microsoft who is responsible for their half-baked implementation of namespaces should be taken out and shot...