Uploaded March 2014 | Updated September 2026, 5 days ago

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Ran into this problem a couple weeks ago and as it was kind of weird, I made a video of it. Malware can also cause this issue.

Sometimes this appears after installing a new program or removing one and after that for ex. all shortcuts are linked to Adobe acrobat and you will just get an error that the lnk file is not a file Acrobat understands.

The fix is simple, just a little bit of editing in registry.

the keys are in .lnk in
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts\
and
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\

The command to run in admin command prompt is "assoc .lnk=lnkfile"