Invalid Shortcuts, and Notepad not working

[Guest WarKirby]

I was deleting some unused icons from my desktop this morning, when things

suddenly started acting a little strange. After a little investigation, two

things are wrong.

 

1. Many (~40%) of the icons in my start menu have become This symbol:

http://i103.photobucket.com/albums/m143/WarKirby/symbol.png

And refuse to do anything when selected. Right clicking and selecting

properties tells me "This is not a valid shortcut". The actual program they

point to is unaffected, but this is an annoying inconvenience.

 

2. Farther to that, and far more worrying, notepad has suddenly ceased to

work. Trying to open any .txt file causes a black console window to appear

for half a second, then vanish. the file does not open.

 

In case I messed something up, I rolled back to a restore point from last

night, but the problems are still there. Can anyone help ?