Maintenance is important.
Maintenance is important.
Occasionally malware, or accidents, happen and the IE icon gets deleted. Instead of creating a shortcut to it you may wish to just recreate it. As it turns out it doesn't actually get deleted. What actually happens is one or more of a few registry values are entered that hides it. As such all you need to do is edit the registry in order to make it shown again. Seeing the danger of this most people are avised not to. Rather just run the file found below and either log out and then back in or click on a blank spot on your desktop and press F5 to refresh it to show the icon.
If you'd like to know how to do it on your own you can examine the contents of the file, which I've decided to show below, since it's just a text file with a .reg extension.
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer]
"NoInternetIcon"=-
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\HideDesktopIcons\NewStartPanel]
"{871C5380-42A0-1069-A2EA-08002B30309D}"=-
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\HideDesktopIcons\ClassicStartMenu]
"{871C5380-42A0-1069-A2EA-08002B30309D}"=-
With any registry file you need to state which one it is, XP and Vista, and I believe 2K are the only ones which accept version 5. You must then skip a line. The entries between the opening and closing square brackets are the paths in the registry. This is what you see when using regedit. The other things are editing values in those subkeys/keys. You do it in the following manner.
"Value_Name"="Value_Data" "Value_Name"=dword:00000001 "Value_Name"=-
The first is for string data (text), the second is for hex numbers (usually 00000000 or 00000001 since that would be 0 and 1 respectively, which in boolean terms are false and true). The final entry, the =- entry which I used in showIE.reg removes that value from the registry. If you want to delete an entire subkey/key you put a - right after the opening square bracket.
[-HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Arenlor]
Released Under the Arenlor Freedom License