Intended For Windows XP Windows 2000 Windows Me Windows 98 Windows 95

Shortcuts have two ways of telling you that they're shortcuts. When a shortcut is first created, its caption begins with Shortcut To. The shortcut's icon also has a small curved arrow in the lower-left corner. Although one can simply rename the icon so that Shortcut To isn't there, but there is no way to remove the little arrow for just one shortcut. To turn these features off for good, follow these instructions:

Get rid of Shortcut To:

• Microsoft says that if you remove the Shortcut To text immediately after creating the shortcut at least eight times, that it will stop coming back. Unfortunately, this doesn't always work.
• In other words, No solution. (see below)

Get rid of the curved arrow:

• Run the Registry Editor (REGEDIT.EXE).
• Search for the text IsShortcut, and remove any references to it. This means that there may be more than one occurance of the word.
• Click on the desktop, and press F5 to refresh the desktop so that this change will take effect.

Get rid of either (or both) of them:

• Obtain and install TweakUI.
• In TweakUI, choose the Explorer tab, and use the Shortcut overlay section to choose the overlay icon. Use the somewhat misplaced Prefix "Shortcut to" on new shortcuts option, below, to fix the text.