Windows 10, red shortcut arrows?

[lsevald]

Registered just to respond to this thread. Found it trying to figure this one out myself, and eventually did figure it out.

Turns out a windows update caused this, and the red shortcut happens when there's additional hardlinks of a shortcut. If you right click them, go to properties, then the Link Properties tab and you'll see the other locations. Mine had hardlinks created under "C:\$WINDOWS.~BT\NewOS\Users\...". Once you delete the hardlinks to your afflicted shortcuts the red overlays disappear.

Thanks dibz, that must be it! I do have a hidden "C:\$WINDOWS.~BT\NewOS" folder (win update trying to sneak 1903 in?), so I'm guessing Dism++ cleaned that out, and solved the problem, as it's all empty now.

 

[Bill_Bright]

C:\$WINDOWS.~BT is the folder Media Creation Tool uses.

But Media Creation Tool is not the only user of that folder. The How-to Geek does a pretty good job of explaining that ~BT folder (and the $WINDOWS.~WS folder) here.

These folders were more likely created as part of the upgrade process from a previous build and should have automatically been deleted some time ago (like a couple years ago!). And clearly, for the vast majority of users, they were deleted or this red arrow issue would be very wide spread and we likely would see many more reports. So I can only guess there was some corruption in your folders at some point in time that blocked them from being deleted.

I recommend using Windows own Disk Cleanup to delete the files, as shown in that How-To article.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

Right you are. Those files will appear to do major updates too (like 1809->1903).

Windows will eventually delete them...when it feels like it.

 

[Bill_Bright]

Windows will eventually delete them...when it feels like it.

Well, "should" delete them - after 30 days at the most. So I would say if the folders and all the contents are timestamped more than 30 days ago, then something prevented Windows from deleting them. If Windows is working fine otherwise, and you don't see a need to roll-back to a previous version, then delete them since they are just taking up space, and often many gigabytes of space.