I have a business associate running XP SP2 on a Dell Dimension. He said he was just moving some files around and suddenly his desktop is full of shortcuts, literally hundreds of copies of documents. For example the shortcut’s title may be “Copy (340) of document.doc”. He said he cannot delete any of them, they just keep coming back. Any ideas as to what might be going on here? Thanks.

maybe while he was moving those files around he accidentally made copies of them. what exactly do you mean, "he cannot delete any of them, they just keep coming back"? how are they coming back? OVERRIDE

I agree with OVERRIDE. He must have created these shortcuts. Usually this is sloppy mouse work that creates this sort of problem. The question is "how are they coming back?" Is he trying to delete them by marking a bunch of them with his mouse and in the process creating more?

I found over 4000 files in his c:\documents and settings\username\desktop folder. There were over a hundred copies each of every word and excel document from his My Documents folder. I have not idea how this happened. He obviously didn't do it intentionally and I don't see how he could have done it by mistake. I fear there something must be corrupted to have caused this. I deleted all those files (except of course his desktop icons that were there before) but I fear if it happened once it will happen again. I think that what was happening when he was trying to delete them from the desktop, he would delete a hundred or so (however many icons can fit on a desktop) but then the next hundred would just replaced them, so it appeared as though they weren't being deleted , or kept "coming back". I'd be interested to know if anyone has any thoughts as to what the problem may be. Thanks.

The problem I was referring to in my post above is created when a user tries to bulk copy or bulk erase several files, shortcuts or whatever. When you use the mouse and inadvertantly click and drag the mouse while marking more items all of the marked items are copied at the bottom of the folder. You will find these labelled copy(2)xxx.yyy. If you are not aware of this problem happening you could end up with hundreds of copies. I have seem people copying pictures and end up with copy(2), copy(3),copy(4) and so on. Many hundreds of copies made that have to be erased. The problem is quite common and the only cause I have seen for it is sloppy mouse work. The user will always tell you that they were very careful but when I caught on and was able to reproduce the problem on my own machine I can see just how careful there really were. It is a problem created by the user and the problem they have is "How do I clean up the mess". It is usually time consuming but not impossible. Hope this helps.