If deleting shortcuts is truly impossible, how do simple un-installers do it with their text file detailing shortcut locations, then they remove only what is listed, be it shortcut/file/folder?
Hope you can shed more light on this.
Un-installers are NOT always lucky.
It depends upon the nature of the permission restriction that was applied to the Reparse Point
I prefer to refer to Reparse Points as Black Holes - what goes in does not come back ! !
E.G.....
Send a file to the XP type destination "C:\Documents and Settings\Application Data" and that does NOT exist in W7,
but a Reparse Point is lying in wait and will redirect your file to the W7 equivalent folder.
There are all sorts of permissions restrictions, E.G. Testing \WINDOWS with the DOS CACLS command yields
C:\>CACLS \WINDOWS
C:\Windows NT SERVICE\TrustedInstaller:F
NT SERVICE\TrustedInstaller:(CI)(IO)F
NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM:C
NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM:(OI)(CI)(IO)F
BUILTIN\Administrators:C
BUILTIN\Administrators:(OI)(CI)(IO)F
BUILTIN\Users:R
BUILTIN\Users:(OI)(CI)(IO)(special access:)
GENERIC_READ
GENERIC_EXECUTE
I have seen XP has about 2 dozen DIFFERENT special access permissions of the type GENERIC_???????.
All a USER without admin privileges is allowed to do to Windows system files is read and execute,
but he cannot modify or delete.
I do not know how many extra GENERIC_??????? levels there are in W7.
By default Administrators have FULL authority to change system files,
but are greatly restricted in what they can do via Reparse Points,
and different Reparse Points have different restrictions.
Here is a Black Hole :-
"C:\Documents and Settings\Alan\Application Data\"
That works properly in XP, and is a perverted disaster in W7
The correct path is actually %APPDATA% which works perfectly for both XP and W7
Simple experiment :-
Can you guess how many extra items will appear the second time you type "DIR %APPDATA%\A*" in the sequence below ?
CD \
DIR %APPDATA%\A*
ECHO 1 - %TIME% >> "C:\Documents and Settings\Alan\Application Data\ALAN_TEST.TXT"
ECHO 2 - %TIME% >> "C:\Documents and Settings\Alan\Application Data\ALAN_TEST.TXT"
TYPE "C:\Documents and Settings\Alan\Application Data\ALAN_TEST.TXT"
DEL "C:\Documents and Settings\Alan\Application Data\ALAN_TEST.TXT"
DIR "C:\Documents and Settings\Alan\Application Data\A*"
DIR %APPDATA%\A*
TYPE %APPDATA%\ALAN_TEST.TXT
DEL %APPDATA%\ALAN_TEST.TXT
No peeking - I will post the answer in a minute